“I never thought anomalies would be this big.”

Normally, such a sentiment would’ve been accompanied by animated hand gestures and facial expressions, but Elena was far too exhausted to care. Instead, she scrunched up her face into an expression of disgust.

“UGH! I smell like a gutter!”

Zuken moved closer to her and sniffed behind her ear. “Close, but you’re not quite there yet.”

Elena’s scowled, giving him a light shove. But the Banksi was ready for it, and took a big step back to dodge it with effortless ease, the light-hearted smile on his face unchanging.

She huffed. She could never stay mad at him for long.

“Can you not be so chipper?” Tanya, the ever-disdainful hag, muttered in quite distaste. “I just want to go home and take a long, hot bath.” She peeked at her dirtied fingernails and whimpered.

“Talk about vanity,” Elena muttered.

“Hush, you!” The blonde sent her a dirty, evil-eyed glare. “I wouldn’t be this disheveled if I didn’t have to make up for two people instead of one.”

Normally, Elena would have taken offense at the statement and stared back with flinty eyes, resulting in— as Zuken coined it —an ‘hour-long bitch-fest’. But instead, she settled with sighing loudly. This wasn’t the first time the other girl had gone on a tirade like that. In fact, she’d lost track of how many times the topic came up since they entered the dungeon. Speaking of which…

“How long do you think these tunnels go?” she asked, peering into the darkness ahead of her. “Are we still beneath the desert?”

“It’s an underground anomaly, changeling,” the hag replied, “not a national highway. It twists and turns and bends. Frankly, I’m surprised the air in here is still breathable.”

And, surprisingly, she punctuated her statement by dropping her bags onto the floor.

Elena turned towards her, gobsmacked.

So did Zuken, for that matter, only his expression was less surprised and more amused, true to his character.

“…What?”

“You dropped your luggage,” Elena half-asked half-stated.

Tanya sharply exhaled. “We have been walking for two hours, and I’m sick and tired of traveling around aimlessly. And to top it all off, thanks to our last fight, I’m exhausted. Seriously, princess, it’s time you actually contributed to our little team apart from sensing monsters and becoming invisible when we’re attacked.”

“I’m not—”

“You’ve leveled up, haven’t you?” Tanya pressed. “Have you considered learning a new skill?”

Elena’s mouth clamped shut. It was true that she’d gained two whole levels worth of soul capacity since entering the dungeon, despite her not doing as much during monster encounters. For some reason, whenever a monster was killed in their vicinity, all three of them gained Ex-pees. She had no clue why it happened, but it was just one of those things she took as established fact and moved on.

Not that it mattered, anyway.

“It’s not what you think,” she murmured back.

It didn’t reach Tanya’s ears.

“No, seriously though,” the blonde went on. “You’re a changeling. Surely there’s some spell out there that you can use now. Maybe level up that compulsion thing you have going on.”

She has no clue what she’s talking about.

Elena suppressed the urge to tell her.

Then again, do I?

“It won’t work,” Elena replied, but louder this time.

“What do you mean?”

She grit her teeth at Tanya’s abrasive tone.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, I think it does, princess.” The bronze-plate shot her a withering glare. “See, I’m the one picking up your slack on this team. I think I deserve an explanation.”

“Tanya,” Zuken chimed in, his tone cautious. “Don’t push it.”

“I will push it,” the insufferable girl retorted. “We’ve suffered through weeks and weeks of constant fighting. I get that she was weak in the beginning, but all of us have gained experience from my kills. Even Elena must’ve gained a level by now, and yet I haven’t seen her put any of that new skill cap to use.”

Her words hit Elena like the swing of a manticore’s tail.

She stayed morbidly silent, ignoring the increasing pace of her beating heart.

Like everyone else, Elena also wanted to grow in potential. To become an adventurer and establish herself in something other than an occupation she was naturally good at due to her elven lineage— should she ever choose to embrace that side of her.

Fact of the matter was, she was a changeling. That meant that sometime before her prime, she’d need to choose between her elven lineage and her bremetan side, and her choice would end up reconstructing her soul and reforming her body, leaving her memories intact. If she chose to become an elf, she’d have a far longer lifespan and increased proficiency with compulsion and mind magic, at the cost of significant lifeforce production. If she chose bremetan, she’d lose her magical sensing— something she’d had all her life thus far and begun to associate with herself —but have greater lifeforce production.

Damned if she did. Damned if she didn’t.

But that was a ways away. Here and now, she didn’t need to choose. Hell, all she really needed to do was keep improving herself until the time came to make such important choices.

But she couldn’t.

Tanya wasn’t wrong. She did gain a lot of experience since the start of the mission.

But in a sense, she was wrong. Because Elena hadn’t gained one level.

She’d gained two.

And for someone like her, gaining two levels was practically a dream come true, especially since gaining levels after Level 5 came with definitive increases in soul capacity. And two level-raises should’ve added a plethora of soul caps for her to use and grow.

Instead, she had gained a butchered fragment of it.

“It’s not that I don’t want to learn and grow like everyone else,” she whispered, doing her best to not break down in front of the irritating blonde. She’d known for quite some time that something was wrong with her Schema, but everyone she’d talked about it to was rendered dumbfounded.

According to them, there was no precedent for someone’s Schema to act erroneously.

After all, the Schema was a reflection of one’s soul.

It just didn’t happen.

“Well your actions speak otherwise,” Tanya replied contemptuously. “All this time, I haven’t seen you pick up one new skill. Hell, even I’d have taught you something useful if you asked. But no, a little hard work is too much for the princess,” she mocked.

“Tanya, that’s enough!” Zuken admonished. This time, his voice was enough to silence her.

But Elena wasn’t going to have it. She didn’t want Tanya’s pity. Looking him in the eye, she silently told Zuken to back down. He was one of the many people that knew about her condition, but even the great Zuken Banksi, with all his knowledge and connections, hadn’t been able to find an answer to her unique issue.

“It’s alright,” Elena’s voice faltered on the last word. “Whether I like it or not, she’s on this team. She deserves to know.”

“Know what?”

Tanya’s confused look only made her feel worse. Elena could deal with the other girl’s contempt, but she drew the line when the stone-cold blonde bitch actually looked like she’d care about her personal problems.

Lifting her head, Elena met Tanya’s gaze. “I’m cursed.”

“…”

“…”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m cursed,” Elena repeated.

Tanya’s face slowly turned cherry red. And judging by the shortness of breath, the spasms in her facial muscles, and the twitching of her fingers, it looked like she was on the verge of having an aneurysm. It was understandable— curses weren’t exactly common. Hell, even the word itself had lost its importance over time. Back in the Old World, curses were far more significant.

“And why do you think you’re… cursed?” Tanya asked, with a wooden smile on her face.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” she shrugged back. “I’m a changeling. That means I have a far greater conversion ratio than most bremetans. By my estimations, I should have gotten seventy-three soul caps from my level ups.”

“That’s impressive,” Tanya arched a brow. “So how many did you get?”

Elena looked down at her feet. “Six.”

…

“You know,” Tanya began, pinching the bridge of her nose, “I think it’s high time we met this familiar of yours.”

Elena tilted her head in confusion, before her eyes widened and she beamed with happiness.

“You wanna meet Joey?!”

SOULSCAPE

Name

Lukas Aguilar

Race

Human [Earth]

Level

6

Experience

29

Threshold

720

Experience Conversion Ratio

23%

Utilized Soul Capacity

93/352

ESSENCE

Capacity

220

Breakdown Value

100

Regeneration

72/hr

SKILLS

Internal Lifeforce Manipulation

Level 2

Burst

Level 3

Tachypsychia

Level 2

Empathy

Level 1

Neural Suppression

Level 1

Shatter Fist

Level 1

OMPHALOS FRAGMENT

Partial Fusion | Fragmented | Level 1

Scan

Level 1

Analyze

Level 1

Lukas had to admit. It felt good. It felt beyond good.

Suffering through a world of pain with nothing to go on other than the goddess’s word was one thing. But to see the results of that agony with his very own eyes, to realize that her utterly inexplicable, byzantine plan for his development worked successfully…

Inanna was a ruthless teacher, but he had to admit her way was working.

Already, he was able to feel the changes within himself. Every time he broke through his own limits, he felt a little different. A little new, almost as if he was rediscovering himself. Every time he held his ground, every time he crushed his prey with the ruthlessness of a feral beast, he could feel a growing chasm between himself and what Lukas Aguilar used to be. His relationships, his dream of becoming a lawyer, his life of normalcy— all that now felt like someone else’s life.

Not him.

He could kill an azolg before it got the chance to blink.

He could end a thoggua before it registered the blow.

And fellfen? Bats? Those tiny monsters were inconsequential.

But the funniest part, by far, was how he could actually understand it all. The process of becoming a monster wasn’t indulgence to temptation or sin. Nor was it about taking a darker road or losing oneself in a single moment of lacking self-control.

It was about conscious choice.

The act of choosing to enter the meat grinder willingly. Throwing your soul into the furnace over and over, enough that when it finally came out, you wouldn’t even recognize it.

Monsters weren’t born.

They were melted. Reforged. Hammered. All one blow at a time.

That was what Inanna was doing to him.

He could feel the nod of approval in his head, and frankly, that still terrified him more than anything else.

“You’re finally ready.”

“For what?”

“For your true training to commence.”

“Right,” Lukas breathed. “I almost forgot we were playing tennis this whole time.”

“We may as well be playing recreational sports, mortal,” she spoke, her voice carrying a faint tone of amusement. “All we have accomplished thus far is hammering you down from an unbeaten sheet of metal into haphazard armor. Next, we must ensure it holds firm against superior skill.”

One thing Lukas realized after months of having the deity in his head was that there was little to no point in trying to decipher what she was thinking. So instead, he chose to stay silent and let her continue with her spiel.

“You have harnessed the power of kinetic energy from lifeforce in a multitude of manners. During my time, in the days of the Thessalonian Empire, there existed an art that employed the very skills you have grown familiar with. An art that I myself know of.”

“And you’re going to teach me this art?” Lukas asked. So far, he’d only seen her explain things or throw him into situations with little clues to dig his way out. Even back when he was learning tachypsychia, she had possessed his body and performed the act. It had taken him an endless number of attempts to get it to a level where he could use it in a fight.

This was the first time she was offering to actively teach him something.

“What can I say?” Inanna grinned. “You are a thoroughly maddening yet fascinating mortal. One who manages to stay in my presence without prostrating at my feet.”

For some reason, she almost sounded proud of that fact.

“This art will use a constant stream of lifeforce for grapples, punches, and takedowns, and is best served when fighting an opponent far greater than you in size and strength. They called it...”

He could feel the edges of her lips curl up.

“Pammachon!”