Kimakt nodded. “And our help comes without any conditions. Just… at least think about what we’ve said. I would never demand you throw your life away, but if you see a chance to help out a fellow goblin here or there, at least consider it.”

That was a condition, stupid. But it was a condition I was more than willing to agree to, so I nodded along. A paranoid pragmatist I might be, but I liked to think that I wasn’t a total dick. I was happy to consider helping people, hells, if it was safe I would even do it!

I nodded hurriedly, before he could change his mind. “Alright. How fast can you make the transformation?”

Kimakt scratched his chin. “Well, normally it isn’t much shorter than what you’ve described, but with the proper resources we could probably make it under a week. You’d have to pack away a lot of meat to bulk up enough, but it's doable.”

Wait. I was beginning to get a sinking feeling in my gut. “How much meat?”

Khavik smacked his belly. “A small herd’s worth! Don’t worry, there’s plenty of beasties to go around up top.” He waved a hand at the cat that was still lounging over across the chamber. “If you’re more worried about being made food yourself don’t be, I’m sure we could convince Arisz to watch your back!”

“I can’t eat meat.”

Khavik jerked backwards as if slapped. “What?”

Kimakt merely frowned. “Has the surface population really devolved so far as to be unable to digest meat?”

“No!” I’d be insulted at the insinuation if it wasn’t my own damn fault for not elaborating. “I can’t eat any of the food from down here, remember? The more I tie myself to this place the more likely the wards are to trap me.”

“Mmm.” Kimakt tapped his chin. “That makes things more difficult. How long are you supplied for? That’s the real limit here.”

It hadn’t taken me that long to get here from the Lifefather camp, but I hadn’t been rationing too heavily either. I might need my food to last, but I needed to maintain my strength too.

“Not that long. Maybe another four weeks at the current rate.” The current rate wouldn’t last forever of course, I’d start rationing lightly in a couple of weeks and gradually slow my consumption from there. I figured I could stretch out a month of healthy diet into a few weeks of normal eating followed by months of increasingly delirious hunger.

That just wouldn’t help anything. No ancient secrets would make going into the transformation malnourished a good idea.

“That’s enough going by mass, but trail provisions aren’t the same as freshly killed game…”

Khavik leapt to his feet, a broad grin stretched across his face. “If the food is not good enough to allow a transformation here, then he shall have to transform himself!”

I scratched my head. “Wasn’t that the plan all along?”

Kimakt shook his head slowly. “No. If you had the nutrients to fuel a transformation down here we could awaken other spirits and get an experienced shaman to trigger the process. Khavik is suggesting we teach you how to trigger it on your own. It’s… dangerous.”

Khavik snorted. “That's the boar calling the bear hairy and you know it.”

Boar calling the… My mind hit the end of the unfamiliar idiom and parsed its meaning. “You’ve done this yourself?”

Kimakt shifted his weight uncomfortably. “Maybe. It’s the least safe possible way.”

“And a thousand times safer than what his tribe is used to!”

Kimakt bared his needle teeth. “Not safe enough.”

I rubbed my temples with one hand. “When will either of you learn to damn well explain anything?! What is it that makes this any riskier?”

Kimakt exhaled through his needle teeth. “There are a lot of ways to trigger the transformation to start, all of which have some effect on the time leading up to the transformation. Most of them involve magic, artifacts, or very specific actions. But if a goblin can learn to control their unconscious bodily functions then it is possible to trigger and guide the transformation entirely independently.”

“Which is perfect for you!” Khavik chimed in. “You can learn the body mastery skills down here, then trigger the transformation whenever you want without anybody else’s help. The skills will even be useful on their own, which is more than you can say for any other method.”

Kimakt sighed. “Yes it might be the most fitting, but it still has its risks. Without anyone else to help the process is far less predictable. You’ll need to be able to sense and respond to things as they happen if you want to survive, and it's far harder to do from in the midst of the transformation then from outside it.”

I tapped my foot on the ground. “It’s difficult you say?”

Kimakt looked at me curiously. “Very. It can take years to master. Even if you turn out to be some kind of prodigy you’ll have to keep practicing the exercises I teach you for months before it will be safe to trigger your evolution.”

I smiled. “Then let’s get started.”

Learning conscious bodily control was… interesting.

Okay, that was a starsdamn lie. Learning conscious bodily control was decidedly not interesting. It went beyond mere boredom to achieve a transcendent state of pure infuriation.

I took a deep breath, then another. And another. Gradually I felt my heart begin to slow along with my breath. Then I began to hyperventilate, tracking my heart rate as it accelerated. Then I did the repeated the cycle.

Again. And again.

After approximately a thousand years of that I stopped the cycle, holding my breath and focusing on my heartbeat alone. I felt each beat of my heart and struggled to change it, exerting my will over what Kimakt had claimed was one of the simpler automatic functions to change.

Nothing.

I stifled a growl, but it wasn’t quiet enough to evade Kimakt’s notice.

“I don’t know why you were so confident going into this.”

I sighed and opened my eyes. We were in a smaller side chamber, one that the Deathspeaker shamans used for practice according to Kimakt. I still hadn’t seen any of them aside from the first, but I guess they decided to double down on their creepy aesthetic and hide in the shadows too.

Kimakt was leaning against the wall, presumably out of nothing more than habit, but that’s what he was doing. I glared at the Hob. If I was already distracted there was no reason not to fire back. “If you want to say something why don’t you gift me with your ageless wisdom instead of your stupid sass?”

“Sass? Is speaking the truth sass? I’m just pointing out that some things take time, and you didn’t seem to realize that.”

I opened my mouth to retaliate, then forced it shut to take a deep breath instead. “I was hoping to make faster progress.”

“And I told you that wouldn’t happen. I can teach you the methods, but you’ll have to practice them yourself. The point isn’t to master them now, its to know the drills to master them later. We’re already past the point where we should have switched to the next drill, there isn’t anything for the heartbeat exercise aside from repetition.”

“Yes, but…” I thought over how I could say what I meant. It wasn’t a pleasant truth.

“You want something that can make you stronger before you leave.”

“I need something that will make me stronger now.” There, I’d said it. “I’ve heard of the things between here and the surface. I’m not going to make it.” It hurt me to say it, but it was true. Even with the aid of all my Skills, the odds were slim. Maybe if I ground up a few more Levels, but that still left the question of whether or not the barrier would rip free any Levels gained from the creatures here.

Kimakt hesitated. “You don’t know that. If you were so certain you could simply stay with us.”

No I couldn’t, and I had the feeling he knew it. “I won’t stay in a cage. I’ve given so much to be free, I won’t turn back now. Better to die free.” I wasn’t a fool, I’d accepted suffering now to escape it later, I’d done that for years, but that wasn’t what I faced here. This place was an existential prison, one that trapped even souls. Of all the life down here, only I had a brief window of escape. I wouldn’t turn it down.

Kimakt nodded. Words weren’t necessary, I’d seen the broken shackles on his wrists, I knew he understood.

“There might be a way.”

I froze. There might be a way… I suppressed the hope within me, crushing it down. That rush of sweet adrenaline was poison, a trembling furor that lead to fumbles more often than success. Kimakt stood in silence as I dealt with my feelings, waiting until I was ready to speak. I appreciated that. It took me a bit of time to ready myself back to the grim finality that I’d had before. It was unpleasant, but I trusted it more than hope. Hope broke something in you when it was snatched away, only with a certain fatalism could you hurl yourself into the maw of oblivion for one last shot at salvation.

After all, I may not wish for the false promise of hope, but I’d still seize any chance with both claws. My mouth too if it was particularly slippery.

“What way?” I knew it wouldn’t e pleasant, and that was by goblin standards. Kimakt knew I knew if the look on his face was anything to go by. Scrunched up, like a runt in anticipation of saying something they knew would get them smacked.

Which was stupid, he was bigger than me and how would I smack a ghost anyway? Bastard ought to just spit it out, I’d already resolved to accept it. What other choice did I have? It wasn’t like I was just going to accept death—

“I could possess you.”

Oh. Oooohh.

....

No fucking way.

Kimakt raised his hands. “Not like that! You think I don’t know how this sounds? I don’t want to puppet you about, alright?”

I let my hand relax from the perch above my alchemical pouch where it had instinctively darted. I still kept it there obviously, I wasn’t a moron, but it was no longer halfway in there. Kimakt was standing in the same place, so even if he jumped me I’d have time to respond.

How fast were ghosts? Maybe I should have eavesdropped on a few more of Serias’s lectures...

Kimakt saw my relative relaxation and kept on talking. “First of all, I’m just putting out the idea. It’s your choice, just like it always has been. It would be a temporary thing, I couldn’t leave this place and I don’t know that I would if I could. However, if you could directly witness me directing your body from the inside you just might have a shot at picking up some applicable skills in the next week.”

I hesitated. That was logical. Frighteningly so. If this was really just a ploy to get access to my sweet mortal flesh it was an impressively well thought out one. I mean it would have to be, to get a paranoid little git like me to consider it.

I suppose it all boiled down to whether the risk of temporary slavery was worth it to escape the risk of permanent imprisonment, and, well… hadn’t I already stated my opinion on that?

“How quickly would this learning be?”

Kimakt shrugged seriously. Don’t ask me how one can perform such a flippant gesture seriously, but I’d guess putting a few millennia under your belt added a certain gravitas to everything. “I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly a ghost when I did it for myself, and the tribes above have never needed my assistance.”

Wait. How could I have been so stupid!? “The tribes above! They could help me!”

Why hadn’t the damn bastards told me this was an option back when I was with them!?

But Kimakt’s sad smile killed my hopes. “Nice try, but life can never be so easy, can it? The living tribes nearly all use beast-bonded transformations. They’ve done some really interesting things with it if the shamans down here are anything to go by, but it's still useless to you. Their ritual requires bonding to another living creature, and that would just trap you tighter.”

Ah. “Fuck.”

I wasn’t speaking the old tongue, but Kimakt didn’t need me too in order to understand. Some things were universal. “Fuck indeed.”

In the end, the possession method was hardly pleasant, but undeniably effective. With Kimakt guiding my actions directly I managed to master my heartbeat in just a few hours. It still took a good bit of concentration to get going, but I could nonetheless see it being very useful. There weren’t many creatures that could pick you out by the sound of your heartbeat alone, but thanks to the Lifefathers I knew that some of those creatures lived near the dungeon.

From there we moved on into what my mother had called the endocrine system, the collection of chemical glands that could release hormones into the blood. Kimakt did a brief overview of them all, but at my insistence we quickly moved past the sex hormones and on to something that would be more immediately useful, and far less uncomfortable.

Adrenaline. The substance responsible for both the extra surge of strength when you most needed it and the shaking in your hands that made you fumble at that last critical moment. A powerful ability if used responsibly.

Kimakt certainly seemed to think so. Apparently it affected more than the muscles in your arms and legs, it hit all your muscles. Including the heart. So yeah, definitely something to use with care.

There were a lot of other techniques we went over, most of which were useless. There was only so much the body could do, at least pre-transformation, but Kimakt still made me promise to practice them regularly. After all, it was the act of control itself that would best prepare me for my transformation, and it was within these other techniques that the secret of the Hob evolution was hidden.

Hormones were, after all, one of the more complicated aspects of the body, with each one performing a myriad of different roles depending on the context in which they were released. The Hob metamorphosis was one of those, requiring over a dozen different hormones to be released in specific patterns in the right parts of the brain and body to trigger properly. A failed metamorphosis was worse than none at all, so I’d only get one shot to do it right.

Luckily I could practice manipulating the other purposes of each hormone first, so I wouldn’t be going in completely blind.

On my third day with Kimakt the ghost swirled out of my mouth with an exhale and resumed his own form. “Sadly, this is as far as we’re likely to get. The low hanging fruit has all been picked and the foundations laid for independent practice. There is nothing more we can accomplish in the time allotted.”

I nodded. This was about what I expected, but I still had a few more tricks up my sleeve. “Thank you for your help, but I think I’ll have to ask you for a little more time sheltered here. I would like to meditate on something.”

Kimakt looked a bit surprised, but nodded anyway. “Of course. You are our brother, and are still welcome here. You’re aware of the time pressure, and if you think you have something worth staying here for than that is your decision to make.”

Kimakt gave me a serious look that made it clear that however much he respected my autonomy he didn’t agree with my decision making, then began to fade away. “I’ll leave you to your… meditation. If you require my aid, speak my name and I will appear.”

Huh. That kind of made it sound like he was sticking around to spy on me. Good thing that my plan didn’t require any talking. I closed my eyes and whispered “[Soul Sense].”

Wait, shit, that was talking, wasn’t it? Well it didn’t matter, Kimakt couldn’t speak human language anyway. The point was I had one last thing to do before I left.

I had a Skill to make.