“So. Elasticity,” I muttered.

  “Elasticity?” Addy asked.

  “Elasticity!”

  “That’s a big word.”

  “Sure is.” As far as I was concerned, it was huge.

  The human body is made up of so many materials chiefly defined by how flexible they are. Skin? Incredibly flexible, despite consisting of the same material as finger nails. Bones? Not very flexible in adults, but structurally vital, protecting organs and giving our bodies form. Muscles? Oh boy, those babies were all about flexibility, but that didn’t mean rigid muscles were a bad thing.

  “So Addy, what does it mean when a skill is channeled instead of cast?”

  “A channeled spell can be used before fully charging it first,” she answered in a textbook-style. “Conversely, it cannot be pre-charged.”

  “Alright. Watch my back for a moment.”

  The moment I looked at my lower left hand, furiously chanting channel, channel, channel in my mind, I felt something new pop up in my mind, like a limb that I didn’t know about unfolding. An orange haze enveloped my entire forearm.

  [Target acquired]

  [Channel cost: Major]

  Major cost, just for one limb? Definitely not an in-combat ability.

  “I have a weird… targeting interface?” I turned to Addy.

  “It’s a support-system for casting magic. Some spells can only be cast with a target. It takes a bit of practice to use on the fly. If you need help I can—”

  “I figured it out.” It was a mix of mentally nudging a cursor across my vision and imagining the object I wanted to target. The more concretely I could picture it, the quicker the targeting snapped to whatever it thought I wanted to target. It was fidgety, but also an awful lot like snapping two puzzle pieces together. Except the puzzle piece in my mind fit against every object imaginable, and it was really hard to get it to latch onto the right one.

  No, don’t go there. No, not that finger. No, no, no.

  Maybe I did need a little bit of help.

  The targeting was considering the entire arm as one entity. It was the most obvious way to look at it from my perspective. It even stopped at slightly below my shoulder, since even while looking at the arm everything beyond that part tended to be out of vision — out of sight, out of mind.

  Sight. Mind. Mind and Sense. Is there a synergy here?

  I swapped my six secondary eyes for a pair of primary eyes. The golfball-sized jumping spider eyes bloomed on my forehead like two sunflowers greeting the morning sun. My field of vision shrank, but in exchange the colors and sharpness of everything grew.

  I zoomed in on my arm, twisting it left and right as I focused really, really hard on the outline of one specific muscle.

  Now if I could just get that dang targeting to work… ahah!

  The orange glow retreated underneath my skin, highlighting the brachioradialis muscle in all its twisting beauty. I undid the targeting, and tried to target the ulna, the radius, the entire elbow joint, and the tiny hairs on top of my skin. It all worked. It was a question of perception as much as imagination.

  You don’t need a medical degree for this. You just need to know your anatomy very, very well. And if there’s one thing I was always good at, it was human biology 101.

  “Alright. Watch this.” I did some stretches. Not that I needed to get warmed up, it was just a habit. Then I jumped, once, twice, thrice. With 96 Body, I was beating professional athletes easily. It was safe to say that I could, without a run-up, get the soles of my feet above my shoulder height.

  Now, anticipatory thoughts, think of things you can’t wait to do.

  Get some coffee, reach the next level, have this whole convergence event end, have a full good night’s sleep.

  [Channeling emotion: Anticipation, Joy]

  The change took hold of my achilles tendons with a tingling sensation, like pulling a rubber band submerged in a fizzy soft drink.

  If the tendon gets bendier, I need to make the skin around it bendier too or it’ll break. I’ll need to make the soleus and gastrocnemius muscles more flexible too so I can actually create the energy the tendon needs to store — I’ll get lots of energy just from catching my own steps though. That necessitates more flexibility at the connecting sinews further up and… I’ll need to overhaul my entire mechanical apparatus, won’t I? Well, I’ll start with small, incremental changes and work my way up.

  I can tune my own body. Isn’t that just cool?

  After a whole five minutes spent crouching and flexing my feet, I was done with what the average doctor might call a dirty hackjob. But hey, fine by me as long as it worked.

  Bendier tendons meant they could store much, much more mechanical energy than before, and the achilles tendon allowed for potential energy to be stored in an area small enough that I could make appreciable changes right here and now. So far the theory. Now, time for the practical part.

  I readied myself for a normal, if slightly higher jump, maybe thirty, maybe forty percent.

  Then, I leapt, — holy crap on a stick!

  I flew up and up. Forget one shoulder height, a single leap sent me flying over the dumpster and nearly high enough to grab the lip of the next flattop roof.

  Regrettably, physics kicked in at the height of my parabolic venture.

  I’m falling. Ack.

  I landed on top of a dumpster with a loud metallic rattle, feeling my tendons absorbing the shock and storing it for another rebound even as the shock sent shivers through my legs.

  “You good?” Addy asked over my shoulder. She couldn’t see me grinning.

  Compared to before, it was almost a hundred percent increase. Something was multiplying very nicely here — applied anatomy, skills, and my Body stat. But how far could I really go?

  “Arms & Arms proficiency.”

  My arms glowed yellow for a fraction of a second before I jumped off of the dumpster, grabbed a tiny window-sill, readjusted, then pushed up and away from the wall. I hit the opposing wall, bounced again, and then my hands caught the lip of a flat-top roof. With this many stats and four arms, it was easy to pull myself up and over.

  I punched the air with four arms, feeling alive for the first time in… gosh, I don’t know how long.

  “Spider girl parkour, woooh!”

  “Sam? Where are—get down here.”

  “I, uh, don’t know if I can.” The ground was awfully far away. I was peeking over the edge of a building that was, what, two stories high? That was about thirty-odd feet. Yeah, no way jumping was a safe way to go down. Only my sinews and lower leg muscles were extra flexible; bones and brains and everything else was still as it should be. For now, at least.

  I spied a convenient lamp post. With my spells still running I jumped onto it, slowly and squeakily sliding down until my feet hit the floor. Addy was there, waiting, ready to berate or critique me in some way. But I had another idea.

  Coffee, level, victory. Coffee, level, victory.

  “Wrestle me.” My four hands were ready, making grabby motions. “C’mon. Afraid to lose?”

  Her left eye twitched.

  “Tell me to stop before your bones start creaking.”

  She met my four hands with her one. There was a confidence in her voice that made me pause. Maybe riling her up wasn’t the best idea.

  Addy’s arm flexed and she pushed. Her tall half-werewolf form had less power behind it than the full one, and she only had one arm as well. But when she pushed it felt like I was being shoved back by a train. My feet skidded backwards across the ground until I felt my back against the wall.

  My arms held. Addy’s eyes grew wide.

  “How’s that for a surprise?” I asked with a grin.

  She let out an annoyed grunt. “What. Are. You. Doing?”

  “More flexible muscles can store more energy, but more rigid muscles can bring their strength to bear more quickly. And they’re dang hard to move.” I grinned.

  She tried to push harder. It was freaking hard just holding her off with this much. I didn’t go all-in on stiffening my arms — lack of time, plus it was more of a mixed bag there. [More Arms] was really screwing with the extra strength I gained per arm from the Body stat. If Addy had two arms I would’ve already lost, but as it stood she only had the one.

  “Call it a draw?” I grunted.

  “Compaction:—”

  “Oh you’ve gotta be kidding me—”

  “Reverse.”

  Welp, it was fun while it lasted.

  One moment I was wrestling a somewhat fuzzy tall woman, the next my arms were yanked up above me as I was smushed against the wall by a giant weretanuki.

  “I win.” Her voice had a finality to it.

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  “That you do, big girl,” I said, still dangling from her single hand. “Any feedback?”

  “That’s an interesting spell.” She licked her lips, taking in my arms with the curiosity a cat might give to a particularly interesting mouse. “I’ve seen mimics do something similar before. It’s very precise, very… anatomical.”

  “Tell me about it, I can target individual muscle groups with this. If I screw up, I might snap a bone or tear a muscle just from walking though. I, uh, also think changing this on the fly is going to be quite difficult. ”

  “You’ll learn how to, someday. Maybe. Charging spells proficiently is all about curating and using the right memories at the right time. A single polished memory always works better than many different ones.”

  “I see,” I huffed, pinned against the wall like a bug in a bug collection. “Had your fun wrestling?”

  She stared me in the eyes, mouth opening and closing, failing to say much of anything.

  “... do you think this choker is too kinky?”

  I blinked. The choker. The pink xp-share choker. The one she was wearing around her neck and was constantly fussing with.

  I spluttered. The heck Addy, you can’t just drop that out of nowhere.

  “Not really? Chokers have been around since antiquity. They’re pretty normal. If it bothers you, think of it as a tighter necklace. Or you could, y’know, just take it off. Or wear it as a friendship bracelet.”

  “It’s not just a friendship bracelet.” She licked her nose. “I like it as it is.”

  “Then I like it too.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  “Can you let me go now?”

  She did indeed let me go now. I brushed myself down, silently toning down the changes to the muscles in two of my arms, keeping two rigid and two flexible. I could fine tune the details later, but for now all I needed was a pair of arms that could take my Spab-4’s recoil more readily. And as a cherry on top, the excitement I gained from anticipating optimizing my body’s functions was fueling those exact changes second by second.

  All that joy was really making my body itch though. I was growing more powerful… but also more itchy by the moment.

  I definitely need to redo this properly the moment I have spare time. Once I do I’ll have a better baseline body, which means I’ll get more effect out of my Body stat. Three out of three spider essences got, and I still have one essence slot open.

  “Unlimited power.” I cackled quietly to myself while Addy doused herself with a bottle of water. “Must get pretty hot in summer with all that fur business going on."

  “The fur. Yes. Of course.” Her tone was entirely neutral. “Let’s clear this block and see if there’s some hint as to where the people have been disappearing to.”

  +++

  The warm asphalt fell away under my feet as I jumped over a leaper. Its paralyzing spines missed me by a good two feet. A quick blap of my Spab-4 and it was transmuted into a puddle of goo.

  I hit the ground running and continued in leaping bounds and bounding leaps. Something in my left ankle didn’t feel quite right. Maybe it was a problem with my [Elasticity] modifications. Maybe it was because I didn’t have time for stretches. I stopped around a corner and checked if I’d been hit, just to be sure.

  “No hit…,” I gasped in between panting and checking my surroundings, “More elasticity… need more elasticity.”

  I was outside of a 7-eleven. The suburbs had made way for a line of commercial stores along where the second main road split off into the M-28. The shops weren’t open for obvious reasons, giving the whole area a sense of abandonment.

  A mimic still half pretending to be a doormat was staring at me. I lined up a shot with my Toothpick, just as a tangler mimic flew out of a driveway and onto the street, squishing the little bugger. Then came Addy, sword thin and long like a katana made for giants.

  The mimic lashed out with its whiplike tendrils. Addy cut them down one by one until all that was left was a quivering mass of amputated limbs surrounding a core.

  She ran it through and that was the end of that. I checked my six again, just to make double sure that it really was the last of them in this area.

  “Freaky how… quiet those buggers… can be,” I huffed.

  “They tend to hunt in ones and twos. No need for lots of communication there,” Addy said. She turned to regard me from head to toe. She was in her hybrid form. And she was still wearing that godawful joke t-shirt with the werewolf on it. “Are you hurt anywhere?”

  “Woof.”

  “... what?”

  “I said my heart feels like it’s about to explode,” I said, wiping a sheen of sweat off of my brows. “But besides that? I’m good.”

  “Good work,” Addy said. She loosened up a little.

  “Aww, were you worried about me?” I asked with a sly grin.

  “Always.” If I hadn’t just run half a marathon, I would have blushed. “How’s the ankle?”

  “Fine, fine, think I just landed a bit awkwardly.”

  She nodded once, then handed me a drink that had materialized out of thin air. “Drink this. It’ll help fix small muscle tears quicker.”

  I grabbed the drink and stared at the label. A labradoodle was emblazoned on the front, sunglasses on its face as it was holding a cold beverage and giving me a thumbs up.

  [DogWatah: Running all day, feeling exhausted? Muscles just not cooperating on a leg day? Need a boost, a pick-me-up, a drink? Get your Dogwatah today! The power of mother nature condensed into liquid form. So fresh, so wow!]

  “Dog water? You want me to drink dog water?”

  “It’s full of electrolytes. Also creatine and caffeine. It's good for you.” Judging by the look on Addy’s face, she was entirely serious. “Even Custodians need to stay hydrated.”

  I took a sip and nearly puked. “It tastes like metal and dirt.”

  “The taste of mother nature,” she parroted, as if mocking some ad she’d heard before. “You should finish the whole bottle. Or do you want to run out of energy while being chased by mimics?”

  “No…” I scrunched my nose and took another few big gulps. “Ugh. Sorry, I shouldn’t complain. You’re right. I need to do whatever I can to keep my performance up. Not like I can just fly away whenever I need to, right?”

  “Yeah.” Addy paused. “I’m glad you’re not one of the damn Uppers.”

  I choked on a sip of dog water. “You’ve got slurs for flying people?”

  Addy nodded. “Uppers. Airheads. Pans and Tinkerbells. People who fly excessively and think that makes them better than everyone are the worst.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I muttered. “Medusahead can’t fly, can she?”

  Addy grimaced. “She says she’d rather use the essence slot for drone stuff.”

  “Ah. I see.” I took another sip of dog water. It still tasted like crap, but I could already feel the phosphocreatine stores in my muscles filling back up. “I definitely prefer coffee.”

  Magical girling was tiring work. In the last three hours alone I’d been in four firefights (I deliver the fire, Addy delivers the fight), escorted three families back to the ‘evac zone’, and found one missing cat. The cat was mostly Addy’s work. When she wasn’t trying to find alien creatures in a city crawling with them, she could work some insane miracles. The cat had been spooked by something and fallen into a dumpster, with the lid closing behind it. Now the grumpy, stinky, and scratchy little guy was reunited with a tearful boy no older than Lily.

  It was good work. It felt rewarding. And regrettably, it also served to distract us every time we thought we had a lead.

  “So,” I said, “Six out of the seven likely nest areas had nothing but a couple mimics and half-dug holes in the ground.”

  “We killed two seeders.” They were ugly lumps made of parts of too many creatures to count, chitinous legs, fins, hairy paws, and the odd bird wing sprouting like a bouquet of tumors. “They’re definitely hunkering down in hopes of weathering the storm. They dig holes that, when looked at from a satellite picture, could in theory hold a burgeoning hive.”

  “And our drones can’t exactly fly in those holes, since they get attacked the moment they get too close to one.” I’d bought a few more flying camera drones so we could cover a wider area, but after losing two to mimic ambushes, they were forced to fly well outside of leaper-spine range.

  At least we were creating some more footage for Tanya to edit and cut together.

  I can’t believe I’m actually relying on Tanya of all people for anything at all.

  “Hey, Sam.” Addy’s hiss tore me out of my thoughts. She had her sword drawn in a frontal guard. Ahead, the 7-Eleven looked absolutely trashed. Bags of Cheetos lay untouched next to dead splotches of pink and black in a sea of broken glass. Other nearby buildings looked similarly trashed.

  Out of the darkness of the shop a human figure staggered towards us. For a moment I thought it might’ve been a looter. Then my four eyes focused on its clothes, an old and withered satin suit in a style from the 90s, and then its hand, skeletal to the bone.

  It was a skeleton in a tux. And it was staggering right towards us.

  “What the hell…”

  “Sam, shoot its belly,” Addy said in a warning tone.

  “What? Why?”

  “Sam, shoot it now—”

  The tux burst open. I yelped. One of my hands jerked up, modified trigger finger pulling back the instant I had it in my sights. A single laser beam blasted a worm-like thing out of the air, sending mimic skin and gore all over me.

  I spluttered and coughed. Moe poked out of my backpack to hand me some TidyBlank and wet wipes.

  “Next time, warn me that they do that,” I said.

  “No time,” Addy countered. “These ones launch themselves forward the moment they feel an opportunity or a threat.”

  I regarded the grizzly bits on the floor. The only thing that was left of the creature was a bright red head crowned by tiny hooks and teeth-like petals. It reminded me of a green sunflower bud that had yet to bloom, or like the microscopic view of the bristly end of a hookworm.

  “Addy, what the heck was that?”

  “Mongolian Deathworm,” Addy growled as the skeleton sagged to the ground, empty and lifeless. “I hate these things.”

  “More than a leaper, or a huntsman, or whatever that giant monkey thing was?”

  Addy nodded gravely. “I heard a mimic got away with copying a real deathworm in the Gobi desert in ‘53. The design was so successful that they were featured in nearly half of all recorded convergence events since. Most mimics have a difficult time copying living organic tissue. These ones get around it by hijacking dead bodies and using them to get close to other living ones.”

  “Mimic zombies? Really? How do they even move, with what nervous system?”

  “They don’t need a nervous system, only a body and some magic strings.” Addy shot me a glare. “If that thing had hit you, it would have burrowed into your body, eaten your intestine in half a minute, and then reanimated you with its necromantic magic. Most victims only have to experience that once. We are Custodians, we have extra lives. And if they get a hand on our magic-empowered bodies, well, things can get really bad.”

  I blanched at that. Shit. It was the ur-mimic all over again, the darkness, the clammy lack of sensory detail, the violent jerks, the loss of any sense of time, sense of self…

  I took a few deep breaths.

  Stop it. Addy is here. You’re safe with her. It won’t happen again.

  “S-so, like, what’s the prevailing method for dealing with them?”

  “Artillery spells. Massed homing spells. Gas. Things you can cast from high up and far away.”

  “We have none of those. And we can’t fly.” Turns out the Mind-focused flyer meta was there for a reason. Well, many reasons. This one was just more persuasive than the rest. “Shit. Shit! What do we do now, Addy?”

  She licked her lips. “For one, I’m buying a gun. What’s the laser thingie you’re using called?”

  “Toothpick, by Light Mechanics Novelty Tech & co.”

  “Ah. Those eggheads.” Addy grimaced. She flipped through their catalog in the shop at a snail’s pace.

  “Do you want me to give you some suggestions or…”

  Suddenly, she bought a few things and closed the shop. “Already bought it.”

  I blinked at her. “That was fast. Was there a design you liked?”

  “A gun is supposed to shoot, not look good.”

  Well. It could do both. Alas, an argument for a different time. We waited a minute for her stuff to arrive. She’d bought quite a bit of ammo which she disappeared into empty air. In exchange, about seven arm-length metal rods clattered to the floor.

  “Here, take these,” she said, pushing the rods with high-voltage warning signs into my hands. “I don’t need them anymore.”

  “Having an inventory-power isn’t all convenient I suppose?”

  “Mhm,” she grunted, sword held in her teeth as she tried to load her new weapon.

  “Need a hand?” I asked, offering four.

  Addy groaned, but let me handle the reloading. She’d bought a sort of laser submachine gun in the same design style as my Toothpick. It was about twice as long, given that as a submachine gun it also needed to hold lots more ammo. The design specifications popped up momentarily as I flicked the safety switch.

  [Prickler Mk4: Your friend for quick and accurate bursts of laser fire, especially useful in close quarters or against quick targets. Can be overloaded for even higher fire rate at the cost of heat generation. The Prickler follows our company’s three laser-technology promises: Doesn’t irradiate your body, doesn’t falter after only a couple shots*, and does cause devastating effects against biologicals. At Light Mechanics Novelty Tech & co. we vow to… Price: 125 Soulcoins.]

  [Firerate may slow by up to 90% depending on heat buildup]

  “Ooh, neat.” I’m totally buying two of those the moment I can afford it.

  “You’ll bankrupt yourself if you want to get one for each arm,” Addy countered, offering me what looked like a superhero belt. It was gaudy and thick, with a golden C embossed on the front of it. She had one for herself too. Gasp, did she want us to wear more matching accessories?

  “Wow, fancy. What’s this?”

  “Anti-deathworm belt.”

  “Ooh, interesting. Let me guess, it creates a forcefield around us when detecting biological high-speed projectiles?”

  “It releases a burst of napalm when it stops detecting vital signals for five minutes,” Addy deadpanned. “That way you don’t have to fight an undead doppelganger with all your stats and gear.”

  “Oh.”

  That was… grim. Effective, but grim. I suppose a forcefield was more expensive than however much Addy had spent on these belts.

  Curious, I opened a tab for forcefields. There were… not that many different types. Not many producers either. It seemed like an incredibly high tech solution that practically required magic to bend the physics in just the right way to make it work.

  The cheapest one went for 1.000 soulcoins. If I could get one of those I’d feel safe walking right into any deathworm den.

  Suddenly, Addy's sniffing turned loud. She turned into a tanuki, plopping onto the floor with her cute little belt and t-shirt squishing her cute little fur as she searched for… something. She waddled over to the corpse, then back to the head of the deathworm, then across the road, then back again.

  When she swapped back, I noticed an eager grin splitting her face.

  “Hey Sam.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Would you like to learn how to take care of a mimic nest on a budget?”

  Rating or Review if you enjoyed the story. Or join my and read up to 11 Chapters ahead. We just finished book 1 over there and are starting book 2 next week. I'll be posting throughout the Christmas week as well, so stay prepared for more chappies!