††† Siegfried †††

Feeling as if he just closed his eyes, Sieg let out an annoyed grunting noise that was a mix between pain and weariness as he was woken up again.

"I'm sorry I couldn't let you sleep any longer. They are sweeping the area, and several enforcers will be sent, so we need to get farther away. I have patched you up as much as possible."

Still groggy but at least able to form coherent thoughts again, Siegfried found a fresh bandage covering the wound. The cut-off remains of the leather vest were sprawled at the ground, his chiselled torso naked, save for the sturdy leather bracers at his arms.

"Wait," he finally managed to address her for the first time, "who are you? Why did you help me?"

"My name is Eurydike, and I helped you because you are one of us." To forestall any further questions, Eurydike began to change before his eyes.

Her brown hair grew out and slowly got brighter until the colour changed completely to blonde. The unremarkable features of her plain-looking face transitioned into fine angular lines, and the thin lips widened into a pouty shape. Even her slim, flat body developed more womanly curves until a completely different human stood before Siegfried. Only the intelligent, attentive spark in her eyes was still the same.

"I will tell you everything when we are safe," she assured him with a fruity, mature voice that matched her appearance. "But we need to escape first. We have built an entrance to the sewers into the basement of this house. We can use it to relocate to another hideout within the slums."

Siegfried clenched his jaws, lips pressed into a thin line. The slums were far. Holding onto Eurydike to steady his gait, he started the battle against the weakness of his drained body once more. Fortunately, he didn't have to climb down— the entrance of the sewer was level with the basement.

Only a few faint rays of light crept through the sparsely distributed drains that kept the streets dry. "Don't worry. I can lead the way in the dark. Better not light any torches and stay quiet. This part of the sewers is seldom used, apart from the odd cleaning crew, but taking any chances now would be folly." The mysterious woman kept a steady, confident tone.

The dark tunnels seemed to go on forever. His arm throbbing with pain, every single step gnawed on Siegfried's determination and resolve to go on. The air was stale, the water murky. The guardsman couldn't help but imagine the sewers as his own stinking grave. He and Eurydike were drenched in sweat from the exertion of heaving his large, exhausted frame forward.

Their relief was nigh ecstatic at the sight of their destination— a slight crudity in the tunnel wall, covering the access to Eurdyke's hideout in the slums. Siegfried just leaned his weight against the hidden door, and they trudged along with renewed vigour. His vision began to blur slightly as he ascended the stairs leading out of the basement.

Adrenaline shot into his veins one more time as he found the wooden structure already occupied. Siegfried pulled his arm from the blonde shapeshifter and instantly summoned his new weapon from his palm.

"Easy Siegfried, they are all friends, all like us," Eurydike intoned with calming indifference.

A young-looking girl sat at a long table, slicing an apple in bite-sized pieces with a wickedly sharp claw. She eyed his blade critically and cocked her head to the side. "Interesting ability, big guy," she said in a chipper voice. The feline ears, poking out between her unusual dark champagne-coloured hair, twitched slightly.

"Haylee, Tyler, stop gawking at Siegfried and help me! I've done what I could, but he lost a lot of blood," the now blonde woman commanded.

"Siegfried? As in Siegfried 'The Just'?" the wiry built man asked half-amused and half-surprised while walking over to them.

The wounded guard, already on his last legs, threw Tyler a weary half-smile. "More like Siegfried 'The Wasted' right now, but you can call me Sieg."

Tyler chuckled while cautiously supporting Siegfried’s left side. Haylee took over for Eurydike on the right and held up his weight with surprising ease. Together they brought him to some kind of infirmary. There were shelves with salves, plants and roots and even some medical tools whose purpose Siegfried couldn't guess. An elevated bed stood in the middle of the room, a clean sheet of white linen spread over its length.

As soon as he lay down, all the adrenaline-induced energy left his body, and despite the agony of his wounds, he fell into a deep slumber.

The next time Sieg woke up, it was to the spicy smell of food, cooking in a pot over the main room's hearth. The scent was carried over by the light breeze from an open window.

"Good morning, Siegfried." Eurydike's soothing tone intensified the calming atmosphere of the quiet house. She had replaced the brown tunic with a white, sleeveless shirt that sported a low neckline and a grey skirt.

"Hey Eurydike, it's already morning?"

"You were drifting in and out of consciousness since yesterday. I used the opportunity to stitch up your arm and shoulder," Eurydike said with slight concern in her eyes. "It will still take at least a few weeks, if not months until you can use it again, and it might still stay a bit stiff. The cut was deep, partly into the bone."

"Months?" Siegfried asked, shocked. Especially in his current situation, that would be a difficult predicament. "And I suppose you don't know anyone in Nemeah with some kind of healing ability?"

"That would make many things easier for us but unfortunately, no. We only know of a few evolved people, as we like to call ourselves, and none have healing abilities. But there might be a different solution if I am right about your own ability." Eurydike lit a spark of bright hope in her patient's dark mood. "Your power can produce an organic weapon in a form that you envision. This is effectively unique, compared to all other skills and changes I have seen."

"But that girl with the cat-ears, Haylee, I think, was also able to shape her nail into a claw," Siegfried interjected.

"Yes, but only within the limits of her natural, feline form. You, on the other side, could definitely sculpt that organic material into various different appearances. But that’s not what I wanted to dwell on right now. I saw how quickly you formed the blade and how long it took to retract it. The logical reason would be that the former is working through an instinctual reflex, while the latter is a conscious process," Eurydike concluded.

Sieg was impressed by the sagacity of this mysterious woman. Countless questions burned on his tongue, more than a few about herself. But his arm was a priority for now.

"A spot-on deduction. I have to hold the image of my uninjured hand in my head and basically will my body to make everything as it was before."

"A good workaround, young man," she said in an almost motherly tone that let Siegfried wonder about her actual age. "And if you just think about that last sentence of yours again, you can surely understand how this is related to your injury."

The teacher-like demeanour almost made Siegfried chuckle, but when he caught on to her hint, his eyes widened in amazement. "You mean I could use that very method to set my arm back to the condition it was in before the injury."

Eurydike let out a soft giggle. "The bewilderment shown on your face is entirely warranted. The potential of this ability is mind-boggling, but the practical application will not be simple. Your body will have to rebuild a lot of muscle tissue, nerves and bone. I want you to start slowly and stop if you feel that anything is going wrong."

Sieg felt a shiver running down his spine at the indication. "What exactly do you mean by wrong?"

"Changing part of our body is a difficult process, Siegfried," Eurydike intoned with a frown. "There is too much we don't understand about it. To alter my physical appearance as quick and flawless as you have seen has taken me a decade to learn and a lot of pain to endure. The first time I tried to change my facial structure, I broke my cheekbones and nose with my own ability as I didn't understand anything about human anatomy. Fortunately, I discovered the same trick as you did. I was able to revert everything to the state that my body and mind were most familiar with."

Sieg cocked an eyebrow at her. "You certainly have a way of reassuring people."

"I just want to make sure that you do not rush anything," she answered with a sly grin. "As a guardsman, at least you should have learned enough about the human body to know the basic composition, right?"

"Very well, if I have those powers, I have to learn about them sooner or later anyway."

Taking a deep breath to steady his nerves, Siegfried closed his eyes and started to focus on the picture of his upper arm. First, the bulk of his biceps with all the veins and bumps. Then crossing over to the deltoid muscle in all the detail he could remember. Slowly he started to feel a tucking and tickling accompanied by a modicum of pain.

He gasped as the ache suddenly spiked to a searing hot agony as a bundle of nerves connected. Only a few seconds, and the pain lessened again.

His elation abruptly switched to panic when unfamiliar sensations of pain started to erupt all over his upper body. With a groan, Siegfried let the image go, and the strange torment of his intestines receded to a manageable degree.

Eurydike was dabbing the sweat off his forehead with a wet cloth. "Describe what happened. It worked at the beginning, didn't it?"

"It did," he answered, still breathing heavily, "then suddenly there was a strange ache from within my chest. I've never felt any similar kind of pain. It felt—" he had to search for the right words, "—it somehow felt as if my body tried to eat itself. And goddess grace, I feel like I'm starving!"

Eurydike chuckled softly and went to fetch him a serving of the stew, boiling over the hearth. Her calmness throughout the whole process was almost unsettling for Sieg.

"It's mostly beans and nuts, anything affordable that will help you produce blood," the impromptu nurse explained.

Ravenous as he was, the simple hot stew tasted marvellous, and Siegfried devoured seven deep bowls in record time before he was finally satisfied. "Thank you, that was the best stew I've ever had. And the odd pain is gone."

"I am just glad I made enough for five days to eat. You just wolfed down seven times what a grown man should eat in a day." She snickered at his embarrassed grimace. "Don't worry about it. I think this is just how your miraculous ability works. Other than any of us, you can not only change the shape of what is already there. I can shift parts of my body around, but you can even regrow muscle. Still, you cannot create something from nothing."

"So when I had no energy reserves left, my body used other parts of myself as energy," Siegfried said with a shiver. His body eating itself had been a very appropriate description.

After stuffing himself with more stew than any man should be able to keep in, he was ready for a second try. Eurydike watched over him the whole time. His face scrunched up in concentration, sometimes twitched from the itch, but it did not hurt as much anymore. It took close to an hour until he opened his eyes again, drenched in sweat, and asked to remove the bandages.

He tried moving his arm and affirmed himself capable of the full range of motion again.

"Astonishing. For someone your age, that was an incredible display of discipline, focusing like that on that single task for an hour," Eurydike said with genuine admiration.

"Part of my combat training," Sieg answered dismissively. "Now, before anything else interrupts us, there is a lot we need to talk about, other than my ability." The guardsman straightened his posture. "First of all, I want to thank you for saving my life out there."

"You are very welcome, Siegfried, and to forestall your first question— no, it was no coincidence that I was in the vicinity, but I didn't know of the enforcer."

"Can you also read minds?" Sieg asked partly in jest but with an uneasy undertone.

Eurydike laughed warmly. "No, but I am good at observing and analysing people. That is what I contribute to our little, hidden society of evolved humans. I try to find others like us before the guard or Red Brigade find them and also keep tabs on various individuals of general interest."

"So that was why you acted as if you knew me before."

"True. After everything I heard and saw of you, I thought there might be a chance to secure a valuable ally for us— even without any special ability. Provided we could appeal to your fabled sense of justice," she vocalised the last part like a mocking chant of worship.

Now it was Sieg who had to laugh out. "Yeah, that part might be a little exaggerated. How long have you been operating all this, and how did you all manage to stay concealed? The three I saw yesterday seem to be away now, so you don't just hole up in here, right?"

"That would be a topic better discussed together. But I will have to insist on a thorough bathing session preceding any further talk. You are, understandably, reeking like a whole platoon of unwashed guardsmen after running in full armour for hours," she wrinkled her nose theatrically.

"Ok, ok," Siegfried laughed, "I'll wash up and get dressed first. Do you have any tunic I could wear? Wouldn't make the best impression on the others if I continue to run around half-naked," he joked.

"Oh, don't you worry— I bet the impression of your well-built physic is already positively etched in Haylee's memory," Eurydike suggested with a wink. "Now, let me show you to the washroom. I'll help wash that broad back of yours." Her voice turned slightly husky at the end.

Siegfried coughed as the sudden images of her curvaceous figure threatened to dry up his throat. "Are you sure about that? I mean, we just met a day ago," he said half-jokingly, testing the waters.

"Oh, get your mind out of the gutter, young man. You can't rub all that grime off your back by yourself, can you?" she scolded him while walking off with a sway of her hips that intentionally pulled his mind into the gutter again. Sieg opened his mouth shortly, just to close it again with a sigh of defeat. He followed her to a small chamber with an actual bathtub, big enough for even him to snugly fit in.

"We chose this location for our main base because one of the aqueducts is coming in right next to it. There is a reservoir that 'borrows' water directly from the channel," Eurydike explained proudly. She tugged on a rope connected to an opening mechanism, and clean water streamed through a pipe into the tub.

The former slum kid was suitably impressed. "A touch of decadence amidst the rookery," he mused and let his hand dip into the water. "Pleasantly warm. The reservoir was heated up by the sun. That's more comfort than Bolverk got in his house." A pang of guilt stuck Sieg at the thought of Bolverk worrying over his 'boy' while he was actually going to enjoy a warm bath.