“I’m not hungry,” said Burrito-Addy as she finally managed to sit down on a chair. It swerved out from under the bar’s counter on rails, making it dang hard to keep your butt from sliding if you didn’t have a hand free to balance yourself.

  “I don’t believe that for a second,” I said, gathering a bounty of steaming foodstuffs from the air fryer. “You can’t tell me that you’re eating well while you’re on a mimic murder spree. Which we will have words about soon, so you can charge your anticipation spell off of that.”

  She made a grouchy face before flopping down on the counter. “I don’t think I have the energy.”

  “A clear sign that you're failing at this whole vacation quest. Let’s start slow: You need some food for the soul.”

  “Soul food is expensive,” she grumbled, retreating into the layers of blankets wrapped around her as the coffee machine loudly ground beans to bits. “Turkey sandwiches are fine.”

  “The ones with exactly one piece of lettuce and no sauce? Addy, they’re drier than a cremated nun. That can’t be all you’re subsisting on.” Except, having exactly one food item to eat for every meal sounded incredibly efficient. And therefore, it was exactly what Addy would do.

  I squinted at her as the extra mucho double lattissimo finished dripping into a wine glass. Because if you had a wine glass and a coffee machine worth as much as a small car, why wouldn’t you try to combine the two at least once? “How many turkey sandwiches do you have left in your inventory storage?”

  “... 657.”

  “Well, no more of that. From today on, you are diversifying your nutrient intake.” I plonked down a plate stacked high with a breakfast fit for a 19th century factory worker. “So here. Dig in.”

  She gave the plate an exploratory sniff. Immediately, her face brightened up. Addy practically inhaled one half of it before even thinking to ask: “Watsh thish?”

  “Fried tofu cubes. Fried broccoli. A salad of carrots, bell peppers, cucumbers, and seeds. And some sweet chili sauce for dipping.”

  “Vegetables!” She made a face like biting into a sour lemon. Which, for the record, isn’t actually that bad. Lemons were my second favorite snack if I wanted to wake myself up. Like a fruit-shaped energy drink.

  “They’re healthy. And you need them to stay in shape.”

  “Nnngh…”

  In the end, she took a second plate of veggies. As predicted, air frying them was a stroke of genius. Even the family-sized bowl of salad disappeared quickly. Custodians, it turned out, had quite the high caloric intake. I cannot understate how surreal it is to eat the daily caloric intake of an adult male in a single sitting and leave thinking that ‘this is enough, for now’.

  Soon enough, we made our way out onto the golf field we were parked at. The owner was nice enough to offer us a year-round membership pass after we made sure his house was entirely mimic free, despite none of us knowing how to play golf. People were still golfing despite the apocalyptic state of the world. It was mostly those too old to give a crap, the regulars looking for community and normalcy, or the filthy rich that were still under the impression that someone was going to deal with these alien problems before they reached their front lawns.

  A few kids were gawking at our mobile home. One of them snapped a picture.

  “Rawr!” I said, playfully showing my fangs, and they ran off, screaming.

  “I’m putting this up on Instagram,” a kid with a hat said.

  “I told you she has more arms than before!” a boy screamed. “You think she’ll get legs next?”

  “Eeew,” one of the girls cried, miming wiping something dirty off her fingers.

  “She’s totally getting spider legs. Hairy, spiky, twitchy, growing from her butt.”

  “EW EW EW!”

  Wow. That was… wow. Kiddos, please, I’m more than a little bit hurt.

  “Custodian scares children, becomes casualty in verbal showdown, disrupts golf. Great publicity.” Addy hopped ahead of me, having accepted that it was up to me to determine when exactly she was released from burrito-prison.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’m usually great with kids. And Tanya is… really getting into the social media aspect of Custodian life.” Though most of her videos were shortform content teasering Addy in her hybrid form as some sort of werewolf bad-cop, complete with phonk edits and highly touched-up close-ups of her face anytime she struck a moderately cool pose. Which was quite often given that most of our content was created during fights for literal life or death.

  The comments were… inspiring. A lot of people wanted her to do very specific things to very specific parts of their body, repeatedly.

  I was not jealous of the attention. Not one bit. Nope.

  The thought that Tanya of all people was profiting off of our existence rankled me. Sure, I’d saved my former bully from being abducted by mimics, and she said ‘thank you’ plenty of times. But never once did she say those other two simple words I wanted her to say.

  I smacked my cheeks. Productive thoughts, Sam! Today was a day for training, for self improvement. If anything was going to hold me back, it sure as heck was not supposed to be myself.

  The grass was green, the morning air crisp with a promise of sunshine. Dew turned the grass a silvery gray as we moved to a part of the golf course that was closed off due to construction, construction which had stalled ever since the contractors bailed.

  Addy found a rise in the terrain and then hopped in a circle until she was facing me. Our shared stare stretched for a while.

  “I’ve never actually trained anyone,” she said, sheepishly kneading the grass with her feet. “Are you sure you want to learn from me?”

  “I mean, there isn’t exactly a curriculum on how to be a better Custodian.” The look on her face said otherwise. “Wait, there is?”

  “The Academy.”

  I groaned in exasperation. “Again with the inventive names?”

  “It’s an old institution with a treasured history in magic society. Though I suppose there are three of them: One in Madagascar, one in London, and one in Chongqing. You need an invitation to get in which, mind you, are as rare as they are coveted. Mentor Irina managed to get me mine before I… squandered it.”

  Because she went chasing after a mimic in an anger-fueled mission of vengeance. “We are going to have to work on your proclivity to avoid anything unrelated to your current obsession.”

  “... I’m supposed to be training you, not the other way around,” she said, to which I held up my hands as if to say ‘by all means, continue’. “This is straight out of Mentor Irina’s book.”

  She cleared her throat. “Alright you maggot! Are you a Custodian, or are you a wet, flabby spoonful of yesterday’s custard?”

  The sudden shift in her voice from uncertain to army sergeant threw me off. “I… uh, a Custodian!”

  “Wrong! Now get down and give me twenty!”

  “Addy, are you sure this is—”

  “Backtalk? That’s an extra thirty. And that is Ma’am or Sir to you, private Custard.” She shifted into her hybrid form, the blanket-and-climbing-rope covers straining, but not tearing. Suddenly, her appearance matched with her impression as she approached me with a burning gaze. “I got just one question for you: Why aren’t you kissing dirt yet, private?”

  I got down on the ground.

  Hey. This is surprisingly comfortable with six arms. Almost more comfortable than standing on two feet.

  Drill Sergeant Addy stared at me and my six arms comfortably gripping the soil. “Who said your feet are allowed to touch the ground, private?”

  Dangit.

  I raised my feet off the ground. It was still manageable.

  Then Addy jumped on my back, almost making me buckle. Her feet got grass and dirt in my hair as she leaned back on my raised legs with a sigh.

  Oooh, that sneaky Tanuki, she’s getting her revenge for the massage.

  “You’re a terrible excuse for a Custodian, but you make for a great lawnchair. Now, the goal of this training is to make you more than a relief for my tired butt. Stats require a good baseline to scale off of, so start scaling! You will turn your body into steel, your senses into a micron microscope, and your soul into a burning beacon that spells ‘badass” in seven different languages! And while you may make for good furniture in the moment, that doesn’t mean you get to turn your brain off. What is seven times eighteen divided by five?”

  “...twenty-five-point... two?”

  “Correct! Now make some Illusions.”

  Two Samanthas split off of me, each grunting while doing pushups. I wasn’t exactly unfit. Okay, maybe I did drag my feet a little when compared to someone like Addy. I did do cardio though! Twice a week. Except during winter. It was too cold outside for running around the block.

  “More!”

  Two more split off. A mental buzz was making itself annoyingly known, drilling in the back of my mind. It was the same piercing pressure I had when trying to see through too many eyes. My mind was at its limit with four body doubles, even after I reluctantly removed all my extra spider eyes to lessen the mental overhead. Any more complicated command than ‘do pushups’ was going to push it over the edge.

  “Now make two of them dance, and the other two hold a conversation.”

  Something snapped. When I next woke up I was drooling on the grass, green bits tickling the inside of my nose.

  “There’s your limit, private,” Addy said, still lounging on my backside. “You learn a lot of lessons in the field. This is not one of them. If your mind snaps from an overload in a fight, chances are you die. Overtax any part of yourself, and you die. So today we’re going to find your limits, and tomorrow we expand them.”

  I coughed. “So, if I want to train my mind, I just have to, what, read more books?”

  “Books, memory games, logic puzzles. The mind is a muscle like anything else. Train it. Don’t skip Mind day.”

  Of course. What else was I expecting from her?

  “Now get to recharging those doubles, on the double.”

  “H-how do I do that, ma’am?” I wheezed. “I don’t have a reason to be afraid.”

  For a brief moment, I felt her weight increase many times over as she swapped into her weretanuki form, and then back again.

  “There. Enough motivation?”

  Plenty.

  It turns out, the limit of my ability to do pushups was much, much higher than my ability to multitask. Addy still found it, and when she did, she transformed into her big werewolf form anyway just to make sure I really couldn’t go any further. She hounded me through hundreds of crunches, then situps, pull-ups, sprints, stretches, and a dozen other exercises I had never heard of before.

  While my body was active, my mind was assaulted with math questions, geography questions, numbers, letters, letters that were numbers and so on. It felt like she was trying to bludgeon me with a lexicon. I was used to studying under pressure — couldn’t have gotten into med school without that particular skill — but the added multitasking of having to charge any one specific emotion concurrently with the rest was its own set of weights on my mind.

  “Spiders are dumb! Your mother is an unfriendly woman!” Addy barked, trying to distract me by making it easier to charge anger. “Your peers have had emotional training since they were kids, making you not even a third their equal. You’re a third rate Custodian! That means you gotta train three times as hard! Now get to it! Swap those channeled emotions stat!”

  Joy. Fear. Joy. Anticipation. Fear. Joy. Anticipation…

  For Sense, I got to play a minigame on the system interface. It was a series of minigames presented in the shape of a cute little spider avatar trying to climb an infinitely tall tower one step at a time, clearing out rooms and solving timed puzzles. If I discovered a threat too late, the avatar died. If I misidentified a friendly as a threat, or screwed up a puzzle, the avatar also died. Every death completely reset progress to the first level. There were no extra lives.

  The animation that showed the cute spider getting splattered into bits was an extra incentive not to lose. I screwed up my emotional training every time it did, and that gave Addy a reason to punish me by poking me with her toes, putting more weights on my back, or in one terrible instance, tickling me mid-handstand.

  Fear. Fear — Oh she’s definitely doing this as revenge — Akh!

  “C’mon, don’t let a bit of ticklishness distract you again. Oh, you died. Too bad. Here are fifty more pounds on your back.”

  Aaah, someone save me!

  By the end of the day, in spite of my high stats in Body, every piece of me hurt. My eyes burned. The gears of my mind felt like someone had liberally poured sand over them. And for the first time in a while, I learned what it felt like to have an exhausted soul.

  It was like a part of me was a leaky vessel, and my emotions were slowly dripping out, sending a jolt of unwanted affection, perturbation, and despondency through my body.

  “That’s not your soul being exhausted, that’s just the ECC in your brain acting up from overuse,” Addy said, hacking away at today’s dinner prep. “Older models are worse. You should see some of the users still using alpha cores.”

  I groaned into the towel I was using to dry my hair. The bed was as comfy as ever underneath my back. “So the emotional crystal core in my brain is exhausted, not me, huh?”

  “The soul cannot be exhausted. Similarly, it cannot be destroyed, only transformed.” She said it offhandedly, as if it was a commonly known fact. It probably was. The things I didn’t know about this strange new world still outweighed the ones I knew for sure.

  “So, how do you think I did?”

  “For a level 33 Custodian? Pretty terrible across the board, besides where your body is concerned. There, you were merely passable instead of an abject failure.”

  I groaned. Ugh, that was pretty harsh. I thought I had it all when I turned into a magical girl spider vampire person thing: Ability, conviction, purpose. But now I was sure that at least one of those two was inadequate, and another one was flagging.

  After a long day of training, the smell of fried meat filled the mobile home when Addy plonked down a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and various turkey sandwiches. The meagre salad came in a separate bowl. At least this time she added some sauce.

  “Now that your first day is over, we will be going over to a regular schedule of days with light, general exercise, and days with heavy, focused exercise."

  “Please tell me this wasn’t a light day.” Addy gave me a look. I groaned around a mouthful of food. “I regret so many things.”

  “You can deal with regret later. It’s not a productive emotion. Now eat, private. You need the protein.”

  “Not a private,” I grouched. “I want to be a spider.”

  “An unrealistic and unproductive goal.”

  “Well, then I’d like to be a magical girl.”

  “... you’re a girl. And you’re pretty magical already.”

  “True. Counterpoint: I don’t have a transformation.”

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  Addy raised her eyebrows in confusion, turning to disbelief when she noticed my despondent expression.

  “Is a transformation that important?”

  “Of course it is! I don’t have a magical girl transformation!” No rainbows, no sparkles, no cute dress. “That’s like their whole thing. I’m a failure of a magical girl. A magical girl failure. Spider. Person thing.”

  “Don’t forget vampire.”

  I tensed. “I never asked but… is that going to be a problem?”

  “Don’t worry. You’re one of the good ones.”

  “Great. There’s definitely some beef between vampires and werepeople.”

  “Yup.”

  “And it’s not the kind that you can easily explain over dinner?”

  “Nope.”

  I sighed. “I’ll deal with it when I need to.”

  We did the dishes, played some video games, and then it was time to sleep. When Addy was around, we slept together, due to my nightmares. The events inside the Creetkin barrier didn’t leave my dreams, nor would they for likely a long time, if ever. The only thing that centered me on the here and now when I woke up sweating, panting, and lying in complete darkness was the shallow breath of someone else sleeping nearby. Even Becca could only do so much, since she didn’t really make any noises.

  I crawled into the big bed while Addy practically bounced on it, already pressing buttons to make the drop-down TV screen pop out in front. Right, she’d been napping for half of the day, she was likely quite rested.

  And now she was putting on some sort of action flick full of explosions and sudden loud noises. Ugh. At least she was planning to stay the night.

  Addy tensed as I rolled her up in one of the many blankets. “S-sam!?”

  “Shhh. If you’re gonna make me watch something loud, the least you can do is stay quiet.”

  I wrapped my six arms around her and all too soon entered dreamland.

  +++

  Days passed. Maybe weeks. I wasn’t paying attention to the calendar much since every day ended in exhaustion, started with muscle aches, and continued with Addy adding one more proverbial weight onto my back. Just to see what would happen.

  “Today, we’re going over your build,” Addy said, rubbing a number of red welts on her neck. She was squatting on the soles of my feet while I was doing handstand-pushups.

  Oh thank god.

  Apparently, I nibble things in my sleep. Addy was not a fan. She couldn’t complain though. She shifted in between her various forms depending on her sleep cycle. I fell off the bed twice this night because she tilted the bed in her huge werewolf form.

  Then again, maybe we were both in our right to complain. Still the best sleep I had in ages. Getting to grab something with all my arms was like getting a hug, but ten times more relaxing.

  I gasped, slowly lowering my body down on one hand. “101, 102 — wooh, build time — 103, 104…”

  Handstand pushups were the choice of torture for the day. I was finishing up on the last hand when she sprang this on me. “Tell me again why I have to do pushups for this?”

  Addy leaned left, forcing me to readjust my balance. “Two simple reasons. One: You’re considerably behind for a Custodian. If you’ve got free time, use it to improve your baseline. While recuperation and muscle growth happen quicker, training to exhaustion gets harder the higher your stats are. As for the second reason, figure that one out on your own. You have ten seconds.”

  The threat of Addy transforming into her heavy weretanuki form hung around my neck like a physical weight. Think Samantha, c’mon, think.

  “Because I need to learn to do multiple things at once?”

  “Correct, private Custard. Also, you interrupted your streak. You know what that means.”

  I gritted my teeth and lifted an arm off the floor. Addy had noticed that normal pushups didn’t do it for me since six arms granted me an insane level of stability. I had over 150 in body after all. My strength gain through the Body stat was divided by my number of arms, meaning they were each much weaker individually than the arms of a human Custodian with comparable stats, but that didn’t matter much when I didn't get too much heavier than I was before.

  I’d been pushing it using only four arms at a time with Addy’s added weight. Now at three, I could feel the end of my strength quickly approaching. The effort of lifting myself off the ground turned from engaging to exhausting.

  “Your build is all over the place,” Addy started again. “You have body modification, illusions, and a diverse array of arms you are constantly swapping through. The main throughline is that most of your spells benefit heavily from multitasking, namely [More Arms], [Illusory double], and [More spider eyes]. [Arms & Arms proficiency] is the easy solution to your problem, if you are willing to rely on it as a crutch. I don’t recommend that. [One moment] helps in emergencies or when you’re overwhelmed, but it requires you to consciously activate it, and it only lasts seconds. [Elasticity] is too granular to use in active combat. And all this is ignoring that the faster you go, the faster you will have to process your surroundings, taxing your mental acuity even more.”

  110… 111… “So what you’re saying is, I should get a passive spell to fix my problem, or git gud.”

  Addy blinked. “If by ‘git gud’ you mean be able to use each spell to its fullest potential, then yes. You are quite lacking in that regard.”

  “Oof.” She was right though. I couldn’t turn my head into an omnidirectional sensor by adding ten pairs of eyes all around. The charging cost of extra eyes quickly turned prohibitive, especially since I was unwilling to remove the pair of primary spider eyes I’d grown on my forehead for any extended period of time. I was already hooked on seeing the world in more colors than before, I couldn’t exactly switch back to inferior hardware. “I guess I should look for an essence that enables the rest of my build then?”

  “No.” I spluttered, nearly collapsing onto my elbows at the frank dismissal. “Your build is already quite able. I am shocked that it works as well as it does since you had to throw it together on the fly. As I’ve been saying, your main problems will solve themselves through training.”

  “Which takes time. And at any time we could get called in by The Society, o-or whatever organisation directs Custodians to points of danger. I need something now.”

  “You’re not in danger anymore.” There was a pause, long, heavy, and awkward. Maybe I was imagining it, but her voice turned softer for a moment. I reached 150 pushups when she spoke again with a contemplative voice. “We can’t expect to stay in one place forever, true. But that doesn’t mean you need to gamble away your future for a chance in the present.”

  “Your words?

  “No. Mason. My partner.” Who was still in a hospital from whatever the ur-mimic did to him. Maybe it was so bad even a regeneration potion couldn’t help. Maybe it did, and she was just kicking their inevitable confrontation further down the road. “Sam, why do you think you shouldn’t use your last essence slot right this moment?”

  I blinked, a pearl of sweat getting into my big spider eyes. “Well, for one, the only essence I have on me is the second vampire essence. That one is technically yours.”

  That wasn’t the main reason though. Agh, how did the essence progression go again? “I have one slot open. And I get the next essence slot at level 40, then 50, then 75, then 100.”

  “Exactly!” Addy shifted on my back, notably not making it easier to lift myself off the ground, but harder. “You already have six essence slots, one more than the average Custodian. That is over half of the amount you can expect to get. Nobody knows what the progression looks like after level 100. XP gain slows down dramatically the higher you get, meaning those four are likely going to be the only essences you will be able to add to your build.”

  “Build-defining, life-changing essences…” Would be great if I just got rares from hereon out. “So wait, how do upgrade points scale then?”

  There was silence as Addy probably pondered how best to put it to someone who was, to put it mildly, new to this whole shtick. “Imagine that your soul — the magical construct, not the stat — grows in power every time you level. Your soul is what makes you, you. It is unique. The system feeds the soul, binding additional growths into your stats and essence slots. However, the standard Custodian contract doesn’t bind all the power. The essence slots are… leaky. This is by design, as the free power that goes unused in the moment can be used to make greater changes in the future.”

  “Sacrificing current power for future potential.”

  “If you want to look at it that way, sure. Say you have an essence slot at level 5. Every thirty levels after that, on levels 35, 65, 95, it has leaked enough power to create an upgrade point. Your level 10 slot gives you a point at levels 40, 70, 100, and your level 15 slot gives points too, as does your level 20, and so on. These upgrade points can be used to influence any essence you have, not just the one that generated it.”

  “Because it is made from the free power of the soul, not bound to any specific essence. And the scaling means that I will get a lot more upgrade points than essence slots, and on top of that, I get even more because of the extra slot I got at lvl 0.”

  “... I was going to get to that.” She sounds slightly miffed. Was she looking forward to explaining — oh god, heavy, heavy, aaaah!

  I squirmed and huffed as in one fell leap Addy jumped up and back onto my outstretched feet, then slowly shifted until she was in her werewolf form. I braced, first with two arms, then four, then all six. She weighed at least three hundred kilo — oh god, all the mimic stuff has made me start thinking in metric. Send help!

  “If you’re so smart, why don’t you just explain the rest?” She grumbled. “I’ll get off if you do.”

  “But what if — huff — I don’t want you to get off?”

  That cheek earned a kick to my butt.

  “Huff — I shouldn’t use essence slots — akh — but upgrade points — hngh! They’re easier to get from hereon — ohmygod — o-out. Maybe diversify with weapons and ivory upgrades… Addy please get off I’m going to collapse ohmyaaah!”

  Addy left with a hop and a satisfied hum, leaving me eating grass again. I shivered as a wave of exhaustion wracked my body. If there was an upside to all this, it was that with 153 Body, I recovered from just about any exhaustion overnight.

  Wait, I still have some free stat points leftover from well before I reached level 30.

  The more I thought about her lecture, the more Addy’s advice rang true: Multitasking was one big skillset with room for improvement. I’d need an essence with Mind scaling, or an ability for multitasking. As a stopgap, assigning some stat points would have to do.

  [Mind: 68->73]

  [Free stat points: 0]

  There we go.

  The cool feeling of extra stats settling inside my head wasn’t what I needed right this moment. Then again, Addy wanted me to sit down and think good and hard about what permanent changes I was inflicting on my body. Honestly, while becoming more of a spider was definitely up there on my choices for the future, going full arachnid was probably not the best move, popularity-wise.

  Spiders couldn’t wear dresses after all.

  Now, I had exactly one upgrade point, and about five ivory soulcoins. Using the latter to upgrade my Toothpick felt wasteful. Despite its sleek design, after using it for a while it dawned on me that, just like its namegiver, the whole thing was built like a consumer good. Repeated shots had turned the vacuum lens opaque, leading to less laser output and more heat generation. Parts of the gun body had warped or cracked. Heck, if I upgraded it like this, the best result I could hope for was that I could throw the entire gun to explode, not just the battery packs.

  The Pricklers were better, yes, but they had to be for nearly five times the price. Their lasers were ever so slightly weaker than a Toothpick’s, slowing down from rapid to single fire as they got closer to overheating. I had no doubt that a few good whacks would set something rattling loose inside them as well. The only weapons I could rely on to keep were my Goop Gun, my Pricklers, the soulbound bazooka, and my Spab-4.

  “Say Addy, can I upgrade a weapon multiple times?”

  “Yup. You get a lower chance to roll big upgrades the more you do, but even small buffs add up.” She twirled her shapeshifting knife-sword-thing. “You can make a really powerful signature weapon by dumping a dozen ivory into it, but I wouldn’t bother until you’ve found something that really fits. Also, if you find a set of armor, throw an ivory on it and see what happens. You might just make it weigh nothing, or double its hardness.”

  Fair point.

  The Spab-4 was a heavy-duty shotgun for the magically enhanced. It was quite good against mimics. It was also upgraded once already, so I was hesitant to dump more upgrades into that.

  The Prickler laser submachine gun was nice, but it really suffered in the power-department. I would benefit more from buying more of them than investing into any single one. And maybe it would warp the same way my Toothpick did after extended use.

  The Goop Gun was upgraded once. The unique relic was more useful in hyper specific situations, rather than being a weapon that I could rely on for every occasion. Maybe if I got one for every hand I could use it as an area-denial tool. Sadly, it was a weapon of D. One of a kind.

  My bazooka on the other hand… it was soulbound. Basically indestructible. Rather, when it was destroyed, It would simply repair itself and become summonable again after a short waiting time.

  [Warning: Soulbound item repair time increases with additional magical load.]

  So, I could upgrade it, but that meant I wouldn’t have it available immediately after being damaged, such as after a respawn. Nobody ever planned to die — okay, maybe I did that one time. But I wasn’t planning for failure here. Lives were the one resource I’d rather not spend liberally. Ivory and silver soulcoins were fair game though. And I deserved a little bit of gambling. As a treat.

  “Alright system, put two ivory into the bazooka.”

  [Ivory soulcoins: 5->3]

  [Rolling attributes]

  [Major positive attribute: Sight seeking interface — May channel anger to create a seeking effect. Only seeks that which you can perceive.]

  [Minor positive attribute: Extra payload (minor) — Increases payload effect.]

  [Moderate negative attribute: Heavy — Increased weight]

  [Minor negative attribute: Anger draw (minor) — Requires anger to sustain heat-seeking ability.]

  Ooh, very nice. Now if I ever needed to take down a helicopter or a jet, I could just project my fury at the pilots and let the missile do the rest.

  … I’m still not very good at getting angry on command.

  I tried picking the launcher up and whoof, that was heavy. Not Addy-heavy (don’t tell her I said that), but it was at least twice as heavy as before. Doubling the weight of the average bazooka at slightly above twelve pounds resulted in a steel rod of about twenty five pounds, or about twelve kilos. It wasn’t exactly hard to carry for the moment, but it would definitely leave a dent on my shoulder if I ran around with it all day. More than that, the extra weight made swiveling the barrel much harder. More mass to accelerate meant more mass to decelerate as well.

  At least it’s a better improvised club now.

  Extra payload was a good modifier. No nonsense, just flat out more effect. Bigger booms for HE, better penetration for HEAT.

  And now, the piece de resistance. Le point de upgrade.

  Now, if you’ll excuse my French, the idea of upgrading any one of my essences sounded cool as heck. I could upgrade any one of the stats they already gave me, increasing the scaling by +1. Number. Go. Up.

  Alternatively, I could upgrade any single spell, passive or active, into a new, improved version. Very cool, in case there was any one spell I supremely relied on.

  And as the final option, I could roll a new choice of spells from among the pool the essence had access to.

  More magic, for me? Gasp! You shouldn’t have.

  A buffet of the good stuff was set right before me and I just couldn’t decide. Did I want more [Elasticity] so I could turn my entire body into one big spring? Should I upgrade [One Moment] to make it last for two full moments instead? Gasp! Did I want even more arms, or more eyes?

  There were two speedbumps though. One, I was already way overwhelmed with six arms and six eyes. Getting more would be actively detrimental. And while that was sad, it didn’t incite the kind of low-burning sense of unease as the other problem child.

  [Vampirism I]. It promised more vampire-y abilities, a whole pack of super senses, durability, et cetera. But I had no doubt that the minor desire to drink blood and minor sensitivity to sunlight would upgrade in turn. And I… wasn’t exactly sold on the vampire pack, in part because I just didn’t know much about vampires.

  Who or what were they exactly? Were they monsters, were they sickly humans, were the sparkly depressed bad boys of a sexy sort? Was it socially acceptable to eat your arch nemesis’ heart? If so, I wanted nothing to do with them.

  Then again, prejudice only leads people to argue in circles. Nothing can be gained if you’re afraid of failure. That’s a lesson I learned my fair share of over the past two weeks.

  “You’ve been staring at your interface for quite a while.” Addy shuffled on over to look past my shoulder. “Need some help?”

  “No, but thanks for asking. I already did what research I could on some of the known essences over the past days. In the end, there really is only one reasonable choice.”

  [Gaining additional spell roll for: Coral Leaper Essence]

  [Gaining: (1) of (3) Spells]

  [Setae] - Anticipation

  Charges: 0/1

  Charge cost: Minor (variable)

  Your body grows many different Setae, capable of sensing pressure differentials, chemical compounds, vibrations, and pheromones in a [3] meter radius around you. The effective radius grows by [5%] per point of Sense. Cost increases depending on number of Setae created.

  [Proprioception Sensors] - Passive

  Gain an intimate understanding and control of the levels of force your body exerts, both within and without. Force sensing accuracy and control grows by [1.5%] per point of Sense.

  [Sticky] - Anticipation

  Channeled ability

  Charge cost: Minor

  Allow parts of your body to adhere to objects. Does not require a chant.

  The plan was to take [Proprioception Sensors] since I was both already stocked with active spells and also needed something to help manage my physiological changes, but nooo, [Sticky], why did you have to appear now!? Running up walls was, like, the spider thing I wanted to do. The only thing higher up on that list was making spider silk, but neither jumping spiders nor huntsman spiders were known for their elaborate silk weaving outside of making cocoons to protect their young.

  And now, I was forced to choose between a good choice, and an even spiderier one.

  “I want to become [Sticky],” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nnngh! Nothing. I’m sticking with the plan.”

  [Proprioception Sensors] is a general term for what I was assuming was a spider’s arcuate body, a crescent-shaped nerve structure in a spider’s brain that helped it determine tasks such as finding the right angle to jump at, launch a web if it was a web launching spider, or other such tasks. It was also a magical ability that would scale my control over limbs and eyes off of Sense, meaning it would both free up more mental space for controlling my body doubles, and it would continue to scale as I increased in level, preempting issues from any future arms.

  At 66 Sense, that was a 99% increase in bodily force perception. It was going to be a big change. But I was ready. It was a more permanent solution than pushing upgrade points into extra Mind scaling anyways.

  [Proprioception Sensors] - Passive

  The change was… understated. Nothing changed much from where I was lying on the ground. But when I moved my arms, my legs, my eyes, it all felt familiar. Like I’d walked the neural pathways a thousand times before. Where they used to be trodden dirt, now they were cobbled stone: secure, easy to traverse, and always there when I needed to go from one confusing array of limbs to the next.

  Addy had rolled off of me in the meantime. I felt the ground beneath two, four, six hands, and kicked off lightly, feet trailing a smooth arc into a handstand. My stance adjusted almost automatically. I only realized that it was compensating for my three exhausted hands by shifting weight on the three others when it had already happened.

  And for once, my mind felt clear. Like I could relegate all these small tasks to some autonomous part of myself and just focus on the important questions in life.

  Was this training really enough to help me? If I was fated to always be worse at channeling emotions than your average Custodian, how could I make up for that when I was also merely adequate in my best areas? What were they going to think when they saw me at the Academy? Because make no mistake, if I wanted to become a real Custodian, I was going to have to go there and get a real education.

  Probably.

  Addy didn’t mention that it was mandatory. But the implication was that I was the odd one out for not having attended. She was in no rush to return either.

  Maybe this was fine for a while longer. Her and I, dealing with small convergence aftershocks, training and eating fried food every day. Nothing could last forever. But I’d be sad when this thing we had right this moment ends.

  I fell back onto the warm grass, staring at the cloudy sky above. “Is all Custodian training this… demanding?”

  “More or less. Be aware, I’m beating years worth of basics into your body, mind, and soul over days. Of course it’s going to be hard, of course it’s going to hurt. But in a few more weeks, maybe half a year, you’ll have enough of the basics down to lay the foundation for your own continued self-improvement.”

  “I feel like my foundation would do better with more snacks and free time.”

  “Your caloric intake is already more than satisfactory,” she said which oof, nice way of implying I was at risk of gaining weight. “You have stats. Rest days are optional.”

  She was obsessing a bit about my effectiveness, though that was very much what Addy did all the time. It was sweet that she cared so much about me being more than a bumbling fool with too many arms. Some might even say she was doing it because she liked me, which, fair, I was pretty cute when I wasn’t covered in sweat and grime.

  I should probably just ask her out to a cafe and clear up the chaotic cloud of emotions hanging over the both of us. Maybe I was just imagining her stares at my back. Wait a second, I should just make some more eyes on the back of my neck and then I would know for sure whether—

  [Attention nearby Custodians! The Lodge of the Lykan in Sault Ste. Marie asks for your immediate aid. This is an unofficial, unpaid summons. Response is not mandatory.]

  Both of us tensed as the same notification popped up in front of both of our eyes. It was a terse message. No quest, no promise of reward. Just a cry for help.

  It wasn’t even a question of whether we were going or not. One look at Addy and I was already off to snag Becca, a bottle of water, and my spider backpack.