Helminsmagic was the arcane art of using parasites to harm or heal. It was a branch of magic much similar to alchemy, but it also had its direct applications in battle. Helminsmages of all kinds would modify their bodies with parasites that granted them exceptional powers—arms that could turn into poisonous tentacles, backs that could grow vibrant wings, appendages that were as sharp as honed blades, and so on. As long as the nutritional burden wasn’t too heavy, a Helminsmage had the freedom to combine the most bizarre parasites into the most customized weapons.

But there was always a grave risk, always a danger, of the brainless parasites crossing the ill-defined line and encroaching upon the absolute sovereignty of their hosts. Internal rebellion was a nightmare to be avoided at all costs. And although he couldn’t count himself among the ranks of Helminsmages, Vance now found himself in their tight shoes—struggling to establish dominance over the new residents of his body. He told Pamela that he wouldn’t wait for death, that he was ready to persevere until his flame’s last hour. And she began to explain to him the theoretical background that was required to keep the greedy parasites in check and, of course, to make them function as his new feet.

“Living bodies have streams of Mana flowing through them at all times. We call these streams the Manotic Connections. When the different organs of a body wish to communicate together, they send Manotic Information along the connections that they share. The information flows and flows, but it never reaches its intended destination unless the connections are stable enough. A paralysis potion, for example, functions by disrupting the important links between voluntary muscles and the brain. When these particular Manotic Connections are destabilized, the subject is unable to move and unable to recover for a certain duration.”

“And what does all of this have to do with the parasites?” Vance asked.

“Well, the parasites now share the same Manotic Connections with the rest of your organs. For you to control them, you have to do two things: to allow Manotic Information to flow upstream, from them, in the form of sensations; and to send it downstream, to them, in the form of motor commands.”

“How do I do that?”

“It’s not something you do consciously.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“You’re supposed to create the suitable conditions.”

“The suitable conditions?”

“Yes. First, you must stabilize the Manotic Connections. Your thoughts and emotions are the key. If you feel weakness and despair, the connections will weaken, and the parasites will have more autonomy to do as they please. With a sound mind and changeless fortitude, however, you keep the connections stable, and you also maintain a channel through which you can influence the parasites. I want you to meditate until you achieve Manotic Stability. When you do, we can then start to train the parasites to perform specific activities, like walking or running or jumping.”

And so Vance began to meditate. He couldn’t move his left arm or his legs yet, so it seemed that this quiet meditation was the best way to spend his time. Guided by careful instructions from Pamela, he recalled the events of the past days—the scarring nightmares, the jarring battles, the recurring treacheries, the infuriating manipulations. Everything he reconstructed in his mind and described to Pamela before he let it go. He wasn’t forgetting about the past; it would be foolish to do so. But he was preventing this past from defining the rest of his future. He was finding a temporary closure—a new starting point with a new forward orientation.

After six hours of meditation, he had arrived inside a safe space empty of all the haunting phantoms. It was a strange spiritual experience, but Pamela had made it possible through her guidance and through an alchemical concoction that lunar elves called Luna’s Grace. He floated in a world without friend or foe, without truth or lie, without right or wrong. Everything external was the same, and the focus was solely on his own existence. These were the beginnings of Manotic Stability—he was knocking on the door to a state of Mana-calm. But he wasn’t there yet; there were still thorns in his path. And conscious of these prickly thorns, Pamela asked, “Why did you become an Adventurer Slayer?”

“I wanted to live longer,” Vance said, still in his meditative trance. There was much more to say, but he felt that these five words summed it all up. In the end, it just boils down to that … I wanted to live longer.

“But you’re living with guilt,” Pamela said.

“I’m not.”

“Your nightmares say otherwise,” she followed up, gently. “Nightmares are a gate to the subconscious. You dreamed of punishment by guillotine and torture by inquisiors. And I can’t imagine that it was a coincidence.”

“You might be right about the Pilgrim’s Dream … But the second nightmare wasn’t about me. It was about Shannon. I was just seeing her memories.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Vance,” Pamela said, holding his hand to assure him of his safety and to keep him focused. “Both nightmares were about you. Even if you saw the memories of this other girl, they were summoned by your own internal struggle.”

“I don’t feel any guilt.”

“But you still think in terms of Good and Evil, Human and Monster.”

“I do … Even if Amirani is a lie, the world is made of Order and Chaos.”

“And what are you as an Adventurer Slayer?”

Vance remained silent.

“Are you Human or Monster? Good or Evil? Order or Chaos?”

“I … I don’t know,” he said.

“And this is the high barrier that we must transcend now,” Pamela said. “To integrate the Dragonsbane parasites, to achieve perfect Manotic Stability, you must go beyond Good and Evil. Understand that the world is not black and white. Let it sink in that we are all humans and monsters at the same time.”

For some reason, Vance remembered his bond with little Timathor.

“The human body does not exist in a sacred bubble as the personification of Good,” Pamela continued. “It coexists with and co-depends on other forms of life. Do not let your heart reject the parasites because of your desire to remain human. Accept them as a new part of the creature you are. You are who you are, and you will always be so.”

The words brought Vance a strange form of relief. It was as if a heavy burden was suddenly sliding off his shoulder, like a thousand-year-old glacier that was finally cracking and melting and sinking into the ocean. Why was it so pleasing to hear that he was who he was? Why was it much better than being told that he was still a human? Perhaps he had known deep down that he was no longer a proper human, but he could never accept the alternative: he could never call himself a monster for any of the heinous crimes he committed. Yes, that was his problem: he saw the whole world through the lenses of the Church—black and white—but couldn’t see himself through these lenses. He was invisible. He was nonexistent. He was an anomaly. He was the missing gray.

Killing to survive longer wasn’t the same as killing haphazardly. He wanted the strength to leave the world of humans behind, to leave the dismal world of meekness and subservience to the Church, the world where humans were protected by orcs, where you couldn’t level up or be independent. And he had always believed that he was justified in this quest. Regardless of what the Church said, he was the shepherd of his own life. But the final cries of Severus, Benedict, Robinia, Kaz, and all his other victims—“Monster!” “Goblin!” “Agent of Chaos!”—were always pushing him to think that he was becoming a mere monster. They were preventing him from discovering the color gray—they kept him invisible in his own eyes.

“My life is more important than yours,” he said, to the voices of his victims.

“Our lives are more important than yours,” the victims replied in unison.

And it was suddenly clear to him why humans had been killing each other since the start of time. Laws, ethics, and systems assign equal value to all lives, but this idealistic perspective is never compatible with the individual will to survive. A cornered rat will offer another rat to the cat. The death of a blood relation is not the same as the death of a stranger. The more distant you are from me—physically, socially, ideologically—the easier it is for me to offer you to the devil. Lives are of equal value—all but in practice. And the Church of Amirani didn’t seek to eliminate murder but to monopolize it.

The Church was converting this life-value inequality into law and deciding which lives were more important according to its own religious taste. So why was it terrible for Vance to assert, in response, that his life was much more valuable? Why was it wrong to replace one inequality with another? At the very least, when he killed adventurers, he was killing people who had set out on a quest for murder—people who enjoyed killing “soulless” monsters, the same way Severus enjoyed torturing Timathor and the mother goblin. It was not that adventurers deserved to die but that they had set out to kill. Because an adventure was nothing but a quest for murder, killing adventurers was not the same as killing a group of innocent people.

“I’m not a monster,” Vance said out loud.

“Yes, you’re neither human nor monster,” Pamela said. “And the parasites too are neither human nor monster. You want to survive. They want to survive. You kill for food and power. They kill for food and power. You know whom to harm and whom to spare. They know whom to harm and whom to spare. Let it sink in that you are different but also similar.”

Vance acknowledged the differences and similarities, and with this simple acknowledgment, his Mental Eye opened to the color gray.

“Now, feeling this moment’s peace,” Pamela said, “try to move your left arm. Slowly at first. If you feel pain, don’t fight it. Let it pass before you try again.”

Hearing these instructions, Vance tried to move his left arm. It was heavy and unwieldy. A battleax or a two-handed sword would have been easier to lift off the ground. But he continued to persevere against all hindrances. His mind was at peace, and an inner stasis is the basis for outer strength. Before long, the tips of his fingers began to part with the ground. They rose slowly off the rock and stone. Then his forearm moved. Then his elbow bent. He couldn’t believe that his left arm was functioning again, but it was the plain truth observable by all. It was a milestone in his recovery.

“The various potions I gave you seem to have worked,” Pamela said, still holding his right hand tight. “But you were able to move your arm only because you took this meditation seriously. Your body and mind are healing hand in hand, and we must press home this advantage. I want you to close your Eye again and to try to move your legs. Not your feet. Move your knees. Move your thighs. Slowly. Carefully.”

Vance tried to move his legs. This task was much more challenging than the first. He lacked confidence in his lower body; he felt that it wouldn’t listen to his commands. But Pamela reassured him with a squeeze of the hand. After thirty minutes of failure, after many imagined movements that were never realized, he managed to lift his right leg off the ground for only a few seconds. After another fifteen minutes, he managed to lift his left. Then two more hours passed, and he was not only lifting them off the ground but also bending his knees. He felt a sudden rush of happiness—even if the movements were small and insignificant, for him they were like long leaps across a fence, from the wastelands of despair to the meadows of timid hope.

“Now we know that you’re in a state close to Manotic Stability,” Pamela said, having seen him move all four of his limbs. “Your success so far is a promising sign, but you mustn’t become complacent. It’s time to try to move your feet. You don’t need to control them in any complex way. I simply want you to move them. I want to see a mental cause and a physical effect.”

Vance couldn’t feel his Dragonsbane feet, so he couldn’t even imagine what it was like to move them. He struggled in vain. Seven hours passed without any good results. Pamela left and came back. Eleanor appeared and disappeared. Vance was murdered by despair and revived by more meditation. Then it happened, exactly 20 hours after the operation, that he noticed an unfamiliar feeling. He felt as if he had grown ankles. Perhaps it was the same feeling a tree had when it extended out with a new branch, the same feeling a salamander had when its tail grew back. There was nothing; then there was something.

“Grown ankles?” Pamela laughed at the awkward expression, her hand placed near her Flame of Revival as if she were politely hiding her mouth. “Grown ankles?” She repeated and laughed again. “I believe you’re describing the upstream flow of Manotic Information. It’s another good sign, but can you move your feet? Can you send information downstream?”

The answer was no: Vance couldn’t move his feet yet. But the upstream flow of Manotic Information continued to increase. After another hour, he felt as if he had grown two insteps. Within another, two soles. Following the third, the dragon claws themselves. And he could finally touch the ground under him—its coldness, its texture, its bumps—through his parasitic feet. Come on, it’s not enough to feel things. I need to be able to move again. He persisted and persisted and persisted, and while the unstoppable clock was announcing the end of his first 24 hours, he finally managed to move his ankles: to rotate them slowly, weakly, nonuniformly, in a counterclockwise direction, as if in firm rebellion against the draconian time limit.

***

After he achieved Manotic Stability and proved that he could move his feet, Vance had to undergo a second operation. This time it was to remove his old human bones that were sticking out of his feet like ugly thorns. Pamela said that it was important to get rid of them before he began the actual physical rehabilitation, and he had no choice but to agree. He lay supine on the ground, clenched his hands, and closed his Mental Eye. Eleanor, who had kept her distance from him all this time, returned and held him down so that the pain wouldn’t make him overreact.

The extra operation took a full hour, during which Pamela diligently worked to extract bone after bone—damaged and dysfunctional—placing them in a special pot full of disinfectant. In the end, a total of 41 bones of various sizes were removed without any complications. Vance was told that he should rest for a while. He was instructed to sleep without changing his current position, so he snoozed off where he was for exactly two hours. It was a short but much needed rest, given that he hadn’t slept for a full day. But it was mainly a chance for the parasites to regenerate and fill the gaps that the removed bones had left.

When he woke up again, he felt that his feet were much lighter than before. Encouraged by both Eleanor and Pamela, he tried to move his ankles, to rotate them in the same way as before, and to his surprise, he was able to do so much faster and much easier. My human bones were in the way all this time. He arrived at this conclusion. Now there’s only the bone structure that the parasites created. It’s connected to the rest of my body, and it’s starting to listen to my commands. I’m gaining control. Hope was flowing, and despair was ebbing. It was time for him to try to stand up for the first time.

What a scary moment it was. Never in his life was he so afraid to move his body. What if the parasites couldn’t balance his weight? What if it proved impossible for them to keep him upright? What if? What if? What if? The possibilities were endless, but reality would soon choose only one. And so he did away with the hypotheticals in his mind and proceeded to discover what was real. Using the cave wall for support, he started to pull himself up from the ground. He had to use his hands to adjust the posture and orientation of his feet—one after the other. Then he had to try to raise himself, slowly, carefully, delicately, without altering this orientation. It was a very clumsy exercise, and he fell to the ground on more than one occasion.

“I wish I could help,” Pamela said. “But I don’t have the muscle.”

“I’ll figure something out on my own,” Vance said.

He was about to try pulling himself up again, but Eleanor suddenly stopped him. She said nothing. She simply walked up to him, bent down, and lifted him off the ground. It seemed that she wanted to contribute to his recovery. He hated that he needed her help, but there was no other option. She was the only one who could handle his body weight. At least she’s learned to keep her lying mouth shut. He swallowed his pride and focused on his tough rehabilitation exercise. It was time for pain and sweat. Only hard work and tireless training could get him through.

With his hands against the wall, with Eleanor’s arms lifting him from his armpits, he would look down at his shivering legs. Then he would concentrate on keeping the dragon claws in the right position. Eleanor would remove her arms, and he would start falling to one side or the other; but he would rise again and try from the start as if he didn’t understand what failure meant. He needed the parasitic muscles to learn how to maintain a certain position, where to contract and where to relax, when to tense up and when to ease up. The only way was through mind-numbing repetition.

And his efforts did pay off. After six more hours and more than 337 falls, he was finally standing up on his own. The parasites were slow learners, but once they learned something, they seemed to retain it using a primitive form of muscle memory. And it was time to test how much this memory could store. Could they also learn to walk? Vance took no breaks and chased the answer right away. Holding Eleanor’s hands for support, he would try to lift his feet off the ground like a child that was still learning to walk. Whenever he took a step, his feet would bend to one side or the other, and he would fall. But not a minute would pass before he was up again.

“You’re making good progress, but you’re forgetting that you have less than three days left in Middlerift,” Pamela said, as she watched from the sidelines. “Pick up the pace, or you won’t have time to slay your beast.”

Six more hours passed; 536 falls occurred in total; then Vance was finally walking without support. His steps were quite slow and clumsy, but they were miracles in themselves. Even Pamela said that she had never seen someone walk so early after an operation, and she couldn’t help but credit Vance’s will to survive. It was this will that made him stand up after every fall, to take another step after every misstep, to strive onward against the uncertainty. Despite the spiral of bad luck and continuous disasters, he was unraveling the dark cocoon and emerging as a creature with a new form.

“Excellent work so far,” Pamela said, after he had become comfortable with walking. “But you haven’t earned yourself any breaks. Onto the next exercise, my diligent Turncoat. Learning to run should be easier than learning to walk. You only need to adopt a more dynamic movement pattern, and with a stable Manotic Connection, you’ll get it done in little time.”

For a change, this optimistic prediction proved to be right. It was the first time since forever that luck smiled upon Vance—a gentle, mellow smile. Not an hour had passed before he was running around the cave at his normal speed. He felt strong after weakness, liberated after incarceration. He had some problems changing directions mid-run, but he was able to overcome these problems with another hour of training, so that in the end, he couldn't notice any differences between his current run and that which involved his original feet. The parasites had proven their competence.

“You’re giving me valuable observations,” Pamela said, with noticeable awe. “By the Maiden, it seems Dragonsbane is more compatible with human bodies than I originally thought. But never mind that now. Since you can finally run around, it’s time to relearn how to jump and dodge.”

Jumping came first. With Eleanor standing by his side, Vance bent his knees and pushed against the ground. That was all he did before he found himself crashing into rocks and stalactites. The cave measured at least ten meters between floor and ceiling, but it seemed that the parasites could handle even greater heights. They propelled him the full ten meters up as if this distance meant nothing. Before he hit the ground again, as he fell like an arrow-struck bird, Eleanor was able to catch him and break his fall. The two ended up on the ground and started to laugh in utter disbelief. It was as if Vance had been flying.

“For a second, I thought you’d never come down,” Eleanor said.

“I didn’t mean to go this high,” Vance said.

“Learning to limit your power is also an important part of the rehabilitation process,” Pamela commented wisely. “I told you the parasites had the potential for superhuman movement, and this is only the start. Time will reveal more and more of this hidden potential.”

With tests and trials, Vance was able to control the height of his jumps and to perfect his landings. As long as he landed on his feet, the parasites were able to absorb the shocks that would’ve otherwise broken his bones or displaced his organs. Then he started to work on sidestepping and back-stepping—the basics of effective evasion and the distant relatives of vertical jumping. With minor adjustments to his stance and balance, he was able to reproduce the same movements that he could make before his irrecoverable injury. And not only did he do so, but he also exceeded his own humble expectations—performing long dodges that were impossible for humans.

“Excellent,” Pamela said. “I feel proud as your Helminsmage.”

After he perfected his dodging moves, Vance paused to cool down. His whole body was drenched in sweat, and his heart was beating faster than it had ever in his life. I can walk, run, jump, and dodge. He wiped the sweat off his neck. This is all I need. I should be ready to leave this cave. He looked at Pamela for quick confirmation, but the lunar elf wasn’t preparing to give him her final advice before his departure. Instead, she was looking through her potion patches for a certain concoction. No one knew why; even Eleanor didn’t seem to understand what the elf was up to.

“Aren’t we done?” Vance said. “I did it. I trained the parasites.”

“No, we’re not done at all,” Pamela said, choosing a set of green patches from among the rest. “There is one last step to complete your rehabilitation. And I’m afraid it’s the most difficult.”

“I don’t need any last steps,” Vance said. “I’m fine. My feet are working fine.”

“Are you sure about that?” Pamela laughed a little and pointed at his feet.

Vance looked down and suddenly saw that they were moving on their own. At first, they were only twitching and vibrating, but then this twitching turned into the movements that he had taught the parasites earlier. He started walking without knowing why, and he continued to walk against his own will until he hit the cave wall and fell on the ground.

“ ‘My feet are working fine,’ he said,” Pamela laughed. She walked over to him and began to explain, “What you did so far was only the work of one week. You were able to use the Manotic Connections to communicate effectively with the parasites, and you taught them how to perform basic movements. Now you need to achieve Manotic Mastery, a state of true dominance that prevents the parasites from acting unless ordered … This is where I predict you will fail the hardest. But …”

“But what?” Vance said, sitting on the ground.

“You told me you recently went through a Redspine High … So luck might be on our side.” Pamela bent down and stuck the green potion patches to his arm. “It’s time for one of the most important battles of your life, Vance. Ready your wits. You will be fighting an enemy that exists but doesn’t exist, a manifestation of the parasites’ deep desire to take over your body, what we call the Spirit of Rebellion.”

Sitting on the ground, Vance looked at the green potion patches. They grew paler and paler as his body absorbed their unknown contents. Then, after the patches dissolved away, he received the following system message:

Status Alert

Your body has finished absorbing Gleengiric Extract.

The Manotic Connections of your body are being contested by the following foreign entity: Dragonsgrief of the Dragonsbane Family of Parasites.

Prove your worth as master. Defeat the hostile manifestation to achieve Manotic Mastery.

As soon as he finished reading the message, Vance looked up, and there—in the deep darkness of Stonethorn Cave—was the silhouette of a dragon.