Jay was sure that if he was actually in his body, he’d be able to hear his heartbeat out of pure panic. Instead, all he got was his mind locking up and his thoughts growing fuzzy around the edges. He tried to deflect again; if Mirdun thought he was lying constantly already, he wouldn’t have a way to tell this from any of the others.

  “I really am a [Snake Tamer].”

  The drakekin scoffed and made a clenching motion with his fist. The spell wrapped around Jay’s chest tightened further than it ever had before, feeling like it should have driven his ribs through his lungs. He guessed that the projection didn’t actually have either of those anatomical features but that didn’t stop the feeling.

  “One of these times you will tell me the truth,” Mirdun sneered. “One of these times.”

  Jay was scrambling for something, anything, that he could do to get out of the spell to end. [Venom Shot] had already proven unable to function underwater, [Terminus] was obviously a no-go, and he had a nasty idea that this was one of the spells without that would remain in place after being cast regardless of what happened to the victim, so [Shadeshroud] wouldn’t even be useful.

  “Tell. Me. The. Truth,” the blue-scaled man growled. “Maybe it will earn you a moment of leniency.”

  It sounded like he had a pretty good idea of what Class Jay was, which drove the panic to a new, desperate, level. None of the potential execution methods he’d learned of that were designed to keep a [Necromancer] down sounded pleasant.

  There was one spell, though. One spell he had been very firmly told not to use again. But if Agensyx had been here instead of off doing whatever it was he was doing out deeper in the ocean, he wouldn’t be in this situation anyway. That seemed like the kind of caveat that would be worth disregarding otherwise good advice.

  Jay stuck a single finger out to face the sadistic drakekin and whispered three words: “Twist and warp.”

  The crackling bolt of coruscating chimerical colors shot out as if the water wasn’t there, drilling straight into Mirdun’s hip.

  “What? What the –” the drakekin started to ask a question before the spell really took effect.

  Jay could feel when that threshold passed. It was like being buffeted by gusts of wind, or pushed around by inconsistent currents. He hadn’t felt that last time he cast it; either the spell was doing something different due to the difference in power or it was the result of experiencing this in the [Astral Projection] form.

  The thoughts slid through the back of his mind as he watched his assailant bulge beneath his diving suit. It did a strangely good job of containing the rampant growth until it hit critical mass and began cracking the faceplate. Disturbingly, Mirdun’s face had remained mostly unaffected, and his mouth was even moving in the same three words he’d said just before the effect latched on initially even as it was squished against the glass

  The spell constraining him shattered and he started to feel bad for the guy. He hadn’t seemed like that good of a person, but if he was actually still conscious in there to any degree, the experience had to be absolutely horrible. Jay threw [Terminus] at him to put an end to that, only to receive a System window in return:

  He definitely was still alive in there, wasn’t he? That was horrifying and growing more so with every passing second as scales melted, molted, or mutated at random. The bulbous flesh became alternatingly bare, flaky, or sheathed in what looked like some kind dried tree bark as each effect took hold.

  It was silent now that he wasn’t trying to interrogate Jay. A complete, utter silence, not just the voiceless background noise of water rushing that was more normal. Just as he was trying to pin a feeling to it and coming to the conclusion that it was the same sort of silence that accompanied the brief sensory deprivation of each System window, one popped up, red text on a glaringly white background:

  If he needed any confirmation that the mind of Mirdun Ghose Rathi was still in there, that was it.

  And that hadn’t changed either, apparently.

  The fact that he was communicating with System windows was extremely strange. A few of the books Jay had read had mentioned something about that being a potential ability given with high rank, rulership, or a few ultra-specialized abilities. None of that seemed to apply here; Mirdun hadn’t been using any of that before the transformation. Did that make it automatically some artifact of [Bolt of Decay]’s effect or was that a bad assumption to make based on limited information?

  Regardless, he tried talking back.

  “Are you actually talking?”

  “Wild. I’ll be honest, I have no idea what I did to you. You won’t believe that, you haven’t believed anything else I’ve said that’s the truth to you.”

  The mutated remnants of Mirdun Ghose Rathi kept growing. Arms – or maybe it was closer to say a twisted mockery of what arms should be – had begun to grow from its back, thin and weighed down with more joints than any one limb should have. They waved, sometimes bumping into one another and seemed to squabble over it each time it happened, the hands twining around whichever had had the misfortune to touch it.

  Sometimes they combined. Sometimes one withered and the other grew. Sometimes they twisted out of existence entirely.

  “Look, what’s the point of this? We’ve established that you won’t believe anything I have to say. And if you are still some portion of who you were before this, you have to know you can’t just go back to your camp like that,” Jay said.

  “Weren’t you just asking me before what Class I was? Now you think you know?”

  As the last window showed up, the thing sprouted more eyes, bubbling up from everywhere around its body. Stalked eyes, bulbous eyes, sunken eyes; they were all there.

  Jay wondered if that was true for a brief second, then realized he could just ask and it wouldn’t matter all that much in the end anyway. Even if the thing did manage to make it back and spilled the beans, who would believe some random abomination straight out of a schlocky cosmic horror movie?

  “Then what do you think I am?” he asked.

  It did know. That was interesting. So were some of the appellations it’d used.

  He knew what the second one meant, at least somewhat, but the final one was not something he knew anything about. Was there some portion of the [Necromancer] class that filled that? Maybe the Curse itself was counted as rejection?

  Aside from all of that, the thing still didn’t know some things about him, or at least hadn’t said them. Of course, his whole “from another world” thing was probably the least dangerous of the two secrets, so maybe he should have preferred that the thing drag that one out into the light. At least there wasn’t magic cancer attached to it.

  “What does that mean? That third label?”

  Jay didn’t know what he’d expected. That was literally the same answer it had been giving the whole time, why would it have changed just because it was mutating into some giant bulbous gorilla-anemone hybrid abomination?

  Those were the only words Jay could think to use to describe what the form was settling into. It had beefy forearms like a gorilla with the face of the drakekin itself still intact, if stretched slightly, but all the waving arms on the back that had now settled into some approximation of an anemone’s sensory tentacles. He couldn’t see the back half of it, but he was sure it was no less disturbing than the front.

  He had a plan for it? That was ominous in the extreme; was it something related to why Mirdun had come after him so hard or was it something related to this new form? Jay guessed that went back to the question of just how much of Mirdun’s consciousness was left inside it. He didn’t really have a way to tell.

  At some point he was going to have to decide how to handle it. There was some part of him relieved that he hadn’t straight up killed the other man, but he also recognized that he had fully meant to. As far as he’d know, he was consigning the drakekin to a horrendous death.

  He’d cast the spell anyway. Jay thought he might feel bad about that if he ever got time to stop and think about it without being in danger. If he had his way, that would come relatively quickly.

  Jay tried to force his [Astral Projection] to end, urging himself to be pulled back to his body, to a complete lack of effect. It really should not have still been going. Why was it? What was keeping him locked here?

  Well, with that being a nonstarter, he tried to run from the abomination. Or at least the closest approximation of running he could manage while moving by focus alone.

  The thing noticed immediately and thick bars of blue light began to paint themselves in the water around Jay. They shifted around him, forming what looked like an icy bird cage, and one at the bottom split into a thin strip that wrapped around Jay’s ankle. A familiar System window appeared when it made contact, and the necromancer’s leg began to stain the same blue.

  From outside the cage, the mutated form of Mirdun reached in to grip Jay by the head. The size of the hand meant it covered his eyes while wrapping almost entirely around his head. He caught the briefest glimpse of an aura of black-and-blue magic forming in the palm of the hand that had its hold on him. Then a new window unfurled.

  The golden glow from his [Astral Projection] form dimmed, a wave of coldness rushing through him.

  Jay still wasn’t entirely clear on what the deal was with the way Mirdun had talked about the Great Serpents. It had the ring of religion to him but there hadn’t been anything he’d read that discussed the drakekin at all, much less their religious beliefs. So he asked.

  “What are the Great Serpents you keep referencing?”

  “Damn,” Jay said. There were a lot of layers to the implications in that.

  The abomination twitched its bulbous head as if listening to something very, very distant.

  On some level, Jay could tell that wasn’t directed at him, but it only confused him more. The reference to faith implied that it was some god involved. Elios again? The god of change had said he wouldn’t bail Jay out again, but what could Mirdun possibly qualify as anymore except corrupted? That was the god’s whole sphere of influence. Maybe he’d stepped in.

  No matter who it was, it hadn’t worked.

  One of the hands on the abomination’s back hands took the cage of blue light from the front hand’s grip. The flexible limb stretched between the magical bars as if to ensure that Jay would jostle with every pull along the seafloor. It seemed that what was left of Mirdun wasn’t heavy enough to walk along the bottom.

  Unfortunately for the abomination, that left it within reach of Jay’s projected form. He didn’t know how much vitality would be within the thing, given its mutated state, but he was willing to bet he could drain something. Maybe it would even be enough to kill the thing before they reached the camp.

  He reached up, laid the lightest finger he could on the tendril, and kicked [Wither] into gear. He didn’t have too much mana left, not after draining it twice, but some had recovered as he tried to get information out of the abomination. Jay felt it latch onto the thing and begin to feed.

  For the first time in days, his Health began to tick back up. It was extremely slow and counteracted immediately by the tumors ticking it down, but at least for now he had a shield again for a while. He kept the drain going, wishing the whole time that he had a way to know how much Health the abomination had.

  And the thing that used to be Mirdun Ghose Rathi never seemed to notice.