With their controller gone, the spears of fog fell back into intangibility. Khashin toppled over immediately; apparently they’d been the only things keeping him upright with that amount of leg damage. Jay could hear him curse as he landed.

  “Someone get Salvidor in here,” the brusant requested. “I don’t like it when my tendons aren’t in their proper places. Or whole.”

  Jay didn’t respond. He probably should have, the words hadn’t been spoken with the tone of something rhetorical, but he was still staring at the elder coronal centipede blocking the doorway. He hadn’t even been able to briefly annoy Ullmin, much less stop him from taking Brocia’s body and going off to do… whatever it was he wanted to do. It pissed him off on more than one level.

  The only other [Necromancer] he’d ever met face-to-face, now she was probably dead. Or worse: trapped in her own mind, watching her body do things she didn’t want. Jay had his own problems with mind control, courtesy of Kalras and his office, that he still wasn’t over. Even if the archdevil let her go at some point, how much deeper of an impact would that leave on her? Not just mind control but complete bodily hijacking.

  If he was lucky, he’d never have to experience that. But it didn’t sound like the devil would stop trying; he had kept saying that Jay was some form of a perfect host, after all. That seemed like the kind of label that wouldn’t go away easily.

  Jay just hoped it wasn’t connected to Elios’s fascination with him. He was level eleven, barely into the second tier. That wasn’t safe ground to be interacting with gods and devils from.

  One of the metallic carvings on the walls glinted, the reflection of the light running straight across his eyes. There hadn’t been light in the right position for that before. The instinctive flinch was just enough to keep him from going back to glaring at the centipede.

  After all, the spread of black fog reversing direction to flow into the room Ullmin had entered was something that shouldn’t be ignored. It had to be related to whatever was happening down there. Maybe it would be easy.

  He chucked a casting of [Commune With Spirit] at the hollow form of the centipede only for it to slide right off with a feeling like it hadn’t reached an appropriate target. Jay had almost been expecting that; there was no way this world was going to let him off with a break and make it that simple.

  Was there something else he could do? Jay briefly called back up the memory of his summary sheet. That had been the closest thing he had that was directly related, so he had no easy method to success, but there was something. How malleable were the System’s abilities?

  “Khashin. How do abilities change?”

  The beefy brusant looked around blearily. He’d been staring back the way he came, clearly still waiting for Salvidor’s healing. “What?”

  Jay repeated the question.

  “You’re Tier Two, right?” He paused to let the other man nod, then continued. “You get familiar with it, then you push it in some way.” He paused again. “It gets more complicated later. You don’t want to know what that means.”

  “Oh I definitely do. Just later,” Jay said. “For now, that’s good enough information. Thank you.”

  Push it. He had to push an ability out of its comfort zone, it sounded like, try to make it do something it couldn’t do before and keep trying until it worked. Maybe he’d gotten lucky.

  But how would he push something out of its comfort zone if he’d never even used it for the typical usage?

  Jay hadn’t run into a lot of other undead to try to seize control of them, so [Command Other Undead] hadn’t come into play yet. He’d taken it in case there was something wandering around a Blight he had to visit; for a short while, he’d anticipated visiting all of them and needed the insurance. Hell, that still might be on the table, but it didn’t change the fact that he hadn’t had a chance to use it yet.

  Something fired off in his brain like the hamster-on-a-wheel that ran it had been given an energy drink. Brocia had called the centipede a familial spirit. [Omnilinguist] had given the term undertones of something like a perpetual blessing on a single bloodline. One spirit for the whole family, made not of natural magic but as an outcropping of the family’s values and existence.

  Maybe [Commune With Spirit] could make up the gap even if it hadn’t let him actually communicate with the thing. That idea sounded right, though he couldn’t tell why or even what made him think that beyond the minor quirk of terminology.

  “I’m going to do something stupid,” he announced to the [Master-at-Arms]. “Hopefully I don’t blow myself up.”

  The big bronzy man let out an exasperated breath. “You’re lucky I can’t stop you. Doing stupid things doesn’t always work.”

  “I’ve got a good feeling about this.” Jay knew he sounded defensive but he also knew he wasn’t going to change.

  He sat down, crossing his legs on the ground. The mist was thin enough now that he didn’t have any worries about Salvidor’s warning of it being poison. There was nothing else to distract him from focusing on the ability itself.

  That turned out to be a good thing. [Command Other Undead] reached out with tendrils of awareness that forced Jay to see, hear, and feel everything they did as they hunted for something resurrected that wasn’t already under his control. [Commune With Spirit] wasn’t helping either, as he didn’t have a specific target for it, so it seemingly registered every spirit within range.

  The flood of information was too much at first. Each spirit’s mind was a cloud of lights hanging in the air, layered in and around dozens of others. If he’d been relying on normal methods, it would have been an uncountable population. Thankfully, he’d already been given the answer to how many there were: 1,336 in total. The entire “Other” population of Arus’s census. And they all seemed to be clustered around this one area.

  He didn’t have time to think about why. He needed to figure out how to make these two abilities slot together. They didn’t seem similar in anything except that they expanded his senses. What was it with the System and giving him sensory-altering traits and abilities? He had a whole suite of them.

  Jay made a gesture of frustration nearly unconsciously and one of the [Command Other Undead] tendrils mimicked the movement, curling in on itself to match his clenched fist and striking at the ground. He could use that. There was no telling if it was going to be the main thing that made up the difference between the two abilities, but it was somewhere to start.

  He took more conscious control of one of the limbs and tried to shut out the awareness of the others. Trying to split his attention five different ways would do more harm than good and he really couldn’t afford the extra time. Every second was another second for Ullmin to accomplish whatever he was trying to do. Every second saw the complete lack of bodily control etch itself further onto Brocia mind.

  The single tendril writhed as he directed it. It had difficulty lifting into the air but the density of the spirits could offset that. Sadly, it also seemed to exist on the same wavelength as the spirits, as they shifted out of its way every time he tried to plunge it into their mind-clouds.

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  They could float over it when he tried to corner them. They could dodge at speed the mental limb couldn’t match. There had to be another angle he could take, a piece he was missing. This still felt right in that indefinable way.

  He let it rest and turned his focus back to [Commune With Spirit]. If there was going to be a clue, it was going to come from that angle. Jay needed to see the spirits clearer to make an attempt that was more than just guesswork.

  The mind-cloud vision narrowed to a single spirit and its immediate surroundings with great effort. It took intense concentration to make it stay there; a small focus was not its natural state and the ability complained the whole time. But it paid dividends. The more closely he saw, the more he could see that any contact between two spirits sparked a connection between their clouds, no matter how slight it was.

  Seeing that gave him an idea.

  He let the focus go on [Commune With Spirit] without actually letting the ability fade, returning it to the tendril of [Command Other Undead]. This time, instead of controlling the limb, he let himself be the limb. It probably wasn’t like being an actual spirit. After all, they were naturally existent, not some human shoving a part of himself into a spell construct.

  It felt oddly like [Astral Projection] but only for a tiny aspect of him. It had one drive: make contact with a spirit in order to relay a conversation between the greater whole and that spirit. As if in testament to how much on the right track he was with this, the sliver of himself succeeded immediately, sidling up to a spirit and brushing its facsimile of a mind-cloud against the true one.

  Jay’s mind wasn’t up to holding the results of the contact between the two. It was like a flashbang of pure – albeit esoterically gathered – sensory information and the spirit’s core drive. That didn’t matter. It had worked; the combination had successfully connected to the spirit’s mind with a feeling like the sudden snap of a set of magnetized toys coming into alignment.

  He extracted himself from the influence of the two spells and found the expected System window waiting for him when he opened his eyes.

  That was even better than he’d expected it to be. Had it connected to Omnilinguist for the translation aspect somehow? He didn’t know enough about the process to actually tell or even to know if that was possible but where else would that have been coming from?

  At least he wouldn’t have to go through the sensory flashbang of trying to see things the way a magic jellyfish did. Again. Just the memory of it disoriented him, though that might have had something to do with the fact that the initial glut of nausea hadn’t truly faded yet.

  Just to experiment, Jay threw the spell out into the world. He expected it to feel the same as his makeshift version but it ended up something closer to a guided spectator camera from a game. His vision flickered into the spectrum the spirits existed on, locking on one each time he glanced at it, and he could feel the possibility of building an actual connection between the mind he was looking in from to the mind-cloud the ability was showing him.

  The entire room was full of them, collectively ambiently drifting, through the second doorway. Was something down there pulling on them the same way Ullmin was pulling the black smoke to himself?

  Jay shook the question off. That wasn’t the important part, not right now; he needed to try to talk to the centipede. He cut his eyes that way, sweeping past the myriad of other spirits between where he had been looking and the now-blocked door. Like something out of an old comic, [Commune With Other] even let his vision drill through the layers of floating creatures and hone in on the centipede itself.

  He definitely wasn’t going to complain about it.

  The elder coronal centipede truly earned the name in this new sight of his. Its mind-cloud outlined the physical body, glowing like the haze around a misty sunrise. There was depth to it, too, something he didn’t see in any of the other spirits; the only differentiation between the layers was that ones closer to the door were stained slightly darker than the ones further towards Jay.

  Something about that seemed wrong in spite of how much it made sense with the sunset coloration of the rest of the mind-cloud but Jay couldn’t put his finger on exactly why it didn’t feel right. He reached out to connect to it and was brought into a similar state to the first time he’d talked to Agensyx. Everything that was him became a similar mind-cloud that reached out to the coronal centipede’s with hair-thin tendrils. Their thoughts – their existences – mixed.

  The first thing that transmitted was a feeling of extreme age. When he’d heard this thing was called an “elder” coronal centipede, he had been thinking of it as something old by human standards. Or at least something old on a conceivable scale; this was something else entirely. The centipede was old on a level that made watching pitch drops fall seem like blinking.

  Whether his own existence and its comparative extreme shortness seemed too short to comprehend to his counterpart, Jay wasn’t sure. In a weird way, he hoped it was. At least then he wouldn’t be the only one trying to wrap his head around a baffling alternative perspective on life.

  Once the brief acclimation was over, he started trying to communicate with it. Despite the portion of the spell’s description that said things would be translated, it didn’t happen without effort. Either his guess about it drawing from Omnilinguist was wrong or there was something else interfering with it.

  I need you to stop guarding this door, Jay tried.

  No. The child must be kept safe.

  I’m not going to hurt her.

  The child must be kept safe. The child must be obeyed. The child needs me here.

  Look, Jay sent. I’m sure you think she told you to be here. Right?

  Yes. The child must be obeyed.

  Okay, sure. What if I told you it wasn’t her?

  You would be lying. It was her, the centipede said. I could see her. I could smell her. I could feel her. The child is the child.

  Bodily, yes, she still exists. I’m sure you’re still bonded to her and everything in whatever form that takes for you. But that’s not her, Jay replied.

  It is her. I am not returned to the core so it is her. Her blood has not been spilled, our connection has not faltered. It is her.

  Stonewalled. Unfortunate but not unexpected. Jay pulled himself together and tried a slightly different take on the same question.

  Does it feel like her? he repeated. Are her thoughts the same? Does it sound like her?

  The coronal centipede fell silent for a second. When its mental voice – buzzing and utterly devoid of even the slightest concept of gendered inflection – returns, its words were laced with reluctance.

  It does not.

  Then let me through.

  You… The centipede hesitated. You will not hurt her?

  Not any more than necessary to bring her back to herself, Jay swore.

  Go.

  At long, long last, the elder coronal centipede undulated out of the way, skittering up the wall to curl in on itself right where the domed ceiling ended. Jay charged through. He didn’t have the minutes to waste just by walking.

  He had another [Necromancer] to rescue.