“Alright, this thing’s trying to slow us down and wear us out by splitting us up,” Calvin said, raising a hand. “We’re not gonna let it.”

Calvinian summoning.

27/47 Bent remaining.

Thumb-sized knick-knacks poured out of the smoke and covered the ground like an ocean of tiny metal men.

“What about Kala and them?” Baroke asked.

“Taking care of that right now,” Calvin said, eyes narrowed as he concentrated on the instructions he was giving the tiny workers.

Calvin glanced up, double checking the angle of the sun.

Right…there.

***Kala***

“I can’t feel Calvin anymore,” Ella said with a shudder, glancing around the jungle with a shudder, torn and broken bodies of the ambushing mutants at her feet. “Do you think-“

Kala had to stand on her tippy-toes to slap a hand over Ella’s mouth, Any other day and she’d enjoy the feel of her lips, but right now was not the time.

Ella stiffened.

Baroke’s debrief had covered how talking in the bubble was a big no-no, and the suck monsters that turned the world grey were drawn to speaking. Not sound in particular, but the utterances of sapient creatures. He’d figured this out after Calvin had asked a few pointed questions.

If Kala was right, they were the ones who’d been taken. The transition had been nearly seamless, but Kala had noticed the positions of their attackers flicker ever so slightly between one blink and the next. Whatever was trying to kill them had gone through a lot of effort to conceal the fact that they’d been taken.

Probably to put them off guard for those crucial extra moments.

Kala glanced at Aoehe and put her finger over her lips.

The aged Genosian shaman nodded and wordlessly raised his hand, releasing a gout of roiling green smoke from his palm. A fraction of a second later, his protector coalesced out of it, casting a suspicious eye at their surroundings.

The old man repeated this three more times, creating a loose circle of disposable warriors between them and the jungle.

A moment later, the jungle turned grey as a massive pseudopod drooped down from the sky itself and began questing around the clearing. It was pinkish and covered with veins and splotches of sickly color. All in all, something that she could have happily gone her entire life without seeing.

Kala glanced at Aoehe and Ella and noticed their eyes were wide with terror, skin covered in goosebumps. They stared straight ahead, and though they seemed like they were trying to look at the strange fleshy thing, their eyes were slipping off of it.

Is this the invisible thing? Kala thought, glancing back to the pseudopod that was feeling around for its prey, coming dangerously close to Ella.

Kala took a step forward and wordlessly tugged her savage out of the way, allowing the creature to pass by unhindered. Ella shivered as the creature passed by them, pooling up against a tree like a thick fluid.

The father and daughter pair looked at Kala with dawning realization as they watched Kala’s eyes track the beast. When she pointed, they moved, without hesitation.

Kala had the feeling that she might feel differently about the unpleasant tube of flesh if she didn’t possess an Ability from her Seer skill that made her immune to mental damage and fear from Seeing the true form of things.

As it stood though, whatever aura the creature projected seemed to slough off of her, simply becoming an ungainly blind tentacle descending from the sky. Easy to step around.

Except when it wasn’t

One of Aoehe’s summons was directly on the other side of the creature, so he had a hard time making out her movements telling him to get out of the way. He finally got a mental instruction from his summoner, but it was just a bit too late, and the pseudopod made contact with the warrior’s elbow.

The pseudopod move like a coiled snake. Gone were the fumbling, somewhat silly movements dragging around the jungle floor, replaced with a deadly, strangling speed.

The bulky Genosian was lifted into the air in a fraction of a second, the pseudopod coiled around him. A disgusting sucker formed at the base of the pseudopod, hovering over the summon’s face.

To his credit, the Genosian warrior winced, but didn’t make any noise as he began leaking green smoke.

A moment later, he began to leak blue mist, and the other three genosian warriors began to sway on their feet, toppling over like dolls with their strings cut.

Aoehe’s eyes widened, and he reached into his mouth and yanked a tooth loose, throwing it up at where his bodyguard was being sucked out of it’s container.

The tooth seared into the side of the pseudopod, cutting and burning the creature, distracting it long enough to drop the warrior to the ground, where he inhaled with a pained gasp. The pseudopod began to flail wildly, sending up goosebumps every time it came close to touching one of them.

Kala watched this and punched the shaman on the shoulder to get his attention. When he looked at her, she pointed at the chained spirit underneath the thrashing pseudopod and made an X with her hands.

She didn’t know if it meant the same thing in genosian, but Aoehe got the idea. He nodded and with a wave of his hand, the summon in the danger zone turned back into green mist and sank into the ground.

She pointed away from the creature. No sense hanging around if it could only detect the sound of creatures talking.

They dove silently into the woods and put as much distance between themselves and the thing as possible, Kala checking over her shoulder every now and then to make sure it wasn’t following.

It wasn’t, but that didn’t mean they were out of hot water yet. The strange fleshy protrusion behind them rose up and merged with the sky.

A moment later, three more of the strange pseudopods descended from the sky, encircling them, snuffling around the jungle floor, their soft-looking bodies bumping into trees and passing through bushes in their search for humans to suck on.

Kala was considering how to get all of them safely past the suck-monsters, when the situation resolved itself. The earth bucked under their feet, and the pseudopods whipped up into the sky as something began carving on the surface of the sky itself.

Light from the sun caught reflections in the sky, creating a message that appeared to blaze with fire, burning the pseudopods that couldn’t retract into the sky in time.

Kala and Ella, I’m headed to the epicenter. Meet us there for extraction. I’m fairly sure we need to kill this thing from both sides, and your assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Love, Calvin

à

At the end of the message was an arrow pointing to the south.

I can do that. Kala thought with a nod. She met Ella’s gaze, and the six of them began sprinting through the jungle, following the path the Knick-knacks had cut.

***Calvin***

“I don’t get it.” Baroke said, shaking his head.

“Nearby fungus will have to take over maintaining the bubble where it was wounded, creating a weaker portion of bubble. This weaker portion will catch the light differently and carry my message with it.”

Baroke frowned at him.

“I get it!” Learner said.

“I’m writing on the fungus and they’re gonna see it.”

“Aaah!”

The three of them put their heads down and began to charge through the jungle, Calvin setting the pace he thought Kala and company would be able to achieve.

***

Resistance got heavier the closer they got to the deep jungle. Aside from the occasional Kugeya and a half dozen times Baroke had almost been eaten by a widowmaker pretending to be Maya, whatever intelligence was controlling the fungus laid traps for them, ranging from simple pits and snares to blades and darts.

Learner had fallen for each trap precisely once, stopping to study each of them with fascination, deconstructing them and hypothesizing how they worked, glancing at Calvin every once in a while, seemingly seeking his approval like a young child.

Baroke on the other hand had managed to fall into the same pit-trap a second time while waiting for her to finish studying it. the archer had been trying to walk and juggle arrows at the same time and tumbled into the hole in the ground, his ridiculously dense body shattering the hardened wooden spikes at the bottom.

There were even less man-made traps, like trees with tiny bristles on their bark that would lock tight to a creature’s skin and refuse to let go.

These spindly trees had the bones of dozens of small animals littering their roots, which curled around their hapless prey.

Baroke leaned up against one of them for a moment and was forced to tear a chunk of the tree’s bark off to get his arm free.

Once he’d accomplished that, of course, the archer immediately started playing with it.

“Stick, unstick. Stick. Unstick.” Baroke said, poking the tree with his finger before tearing it away. The formerly huge archer’s skin was tougher than the tree bark, as it turned out, pulling off a patch each time he drew his hand away.

Learner on the other hand was able to unstick from the tree by allowing her skin to flow out from the tight weave of hairs, curiously studying the effect and also examining the bones a the base of the tree, presumably for new ideas of forms she could take.

The tree bark was tough, causing the entire tree to shudder and sway as it tried with all it’s might to hold onto Baroke’s finger before finally ripping off.

Calvin finally had to drag Baroke away from the tree, refocusing them on the trek just in time to come face to face with the second part of the trap.

It was a creature that walked on four limbs like the gardor, but with none of the lumbering clumsiness, looked at them, perched sideways on a nearby tree.

The creature seemed mammalian, with oversized slaws on both its front and back limbs. It was using these wicked looking claws to cinch into the sticky bark and hold itself aloft, along it to remain at eye level while it stared at them.

Maybe it’s an herbivore. Like a sloth.

The creature opened its mouth and hissed at them. it had a round, rigid tongue with a hole in the center that looked almost like an animal’s dick, and big-ass, sharp canines.

Welp, definitely not an herbivore.

The creature sprung off to Calvin’s side, forcing him to turn to meet it. It landed, still sideways, on another tree and propelled itself upward to a branch before bouncing off with its massive claws and coming straight down at him, hissing all the while, it’s jaw practically unhinges to face those long fangs straight toward him.

Calvin raised his blade and waited for the creature to split itself it half, and that’s where things started going poorly.

The spigot in the center of the creature’s mouth shot out a clear fluid straight at Calvin’s eyeballs.

A good rule of thumb is when something that’s trying to eat you spits a substance at you, you go out of your way to avoid getting any on you.

Calvin used his whorls of Bent to brush the fluid off to the side and dodged at the same time, letting the spit go past, landing in the bushes where it began to smoke.

Calvin could feel the creature’s approach on his skin even though he couldn’t see it, ducked as he was. He whipped his dagger up to bisect the creature, and he felt a ghost of resistance before the monster reeled away, hissing in pain.

It glared at him for a moment, favoring its bleeding front paw. The two shared a moment of mutual disdain before it hopped off and fled into the jungle.

“Huh,” Baroke muttered, lowering his bow. “Maybe that was just an animal.”

Animals and Warped creatures had a vastly different level of aggression. Animals prioritized their lives, and tended to avoid humans and run away as soon as they were injured, while Warped creatures were far more willing to approach people with the intention of making a meal of them and ignoring pain.

Soon, the trees around them began shaking as hundreds of the creatures flooded into the area, rapidly surrounding the three of them on all sides.

The one with the wounded foreleg, far from the largest of the creatures, pointed an accusing paw at Calvin and hissed.

Well, that leans them toward Warped, Calvin thought to himself.

“I hope you’re resistant to acid,” Calvin muttered to Baroke.

“I’ll be fine,” Baroke said, holding an arrow loosely between his forefingers. “What about your sickly ass? I know you haven’t been toughening yourself up a lot recently with your desk job.”

“I’ll be fine,” Calvin said.

“I don’t like acid. I may need more neutral elements in my epidermis if we’re to continue fighting creatures with access to it,” Learner said, pulling her dress up to cover her skin a bit more than before.

“As the discoverer of this species I hereby name them Dicktongues.” Baroke said with a grin.

The dicktongues did not seem to appreciate Baroke’s naming sense, launching themselves out of the trees, proceeded by a hail of acid.

Calvinian summoning

Heart of the swarm.

Chimera

Atom Ant

26/47 Bent remaining.

Calvin hid his real body inside Heart of the Swarm, bursting into green smoke and resolving as a single modified Kurawe before assuming total control over it.

This was an excellent opportunity to put to test the ‘battle form’ concept he’d been working on for a while. By replacing Kurawe’s fat and skin with Nadia’s, he was able to make a body that was generally humanoid and male without being gross, warty, and obese. After shrinking the summon down a bit, it was pretty much the same size and shape as Calvin.

Why can’t I be the base for a battle form? I feel discriminated against! Nadia exclaimed..

Because you’d make a joke about me being inside you, Calvin responded coolly.

Nadia clicked her tongue.

Calvin was also less than enthusiastic about turning into a girl to fight. Calvin would do it if he had to, but having Nadia’s big boobs attached to his front, having wide hips, and no tackle between them was weird.

I knew it!

Calvin clicked his tongue.

The cobbled together body had a bunch upgrades that he’d been prototyping on Nadia.

For example, Calvin thought, flicking his hand toward a charging dicktongue, squeezing the little muscles nestled in his forearm. A stream of reality warping goop ran down the veins in his fingers, mixing right there on his fingertip before lancing outward.

A flicker of light was the only indication anything had happened before the charging creature fell in half, split asunder by a ripple in spacetime.

This ‘battle form’ wasn’t without its problems, as Calvin no longer had access to his sensory mutations. His back received a spatter of acid on his back an instant before a dicktongue landed on him. Against a legend’s skin boosted to thirty one times its usual toughness, the creature’s oversized claws did little more than sting.

Calvin reached back and grabbed the creature, throttling it with one hand while he glanced over at Baroke and Learner.

Baroke was, similar to him, simply ignoring the acid, his skin too tough to receive much damage.

That archer’s gonna get hit with something his Body can’t handle one of these days, Calvin thought, shaking his head. He was comfortable criticizing Baroke for doing the same thing as him because Calvin wasn’t actually risking his own hide.

Learner, on the other hand, was demonstrating remarkably fluid transition between mutation after mutation.

She snapped her fingers, and her body was covered in a bright blue crystalline layer that scattered the acid away from her. She held up a hand and it began glowing with a flickering light that caused the creature charging her to go slack, staring directly into her palm.

She then punched it in the skull, her crystal-covered fist caving in the creature’s face.

Learner’s actually pretty cute. I mean, she does look like Kala, and the way she turned her eyes up at me after each hypothesis was so excited and innocent. It really flipped my Teacher switch. I could see… Wait, NO!

Calvin shook his head.

Thou shalt not lust after Eldritch abominations.

What is it about watching girls murder things that lowers my guard? Shouldn’t it be the opposite?

No, I totally get it, Elliot said. I’m right there with you, bro.