In a moment, the reason why Ayn looked so triumphant became apparent as Valdima fell upon the barrier like a meteorite of golden lightning that almost blinded Medea.

1 hour ago

Guildmistress Valdima was not having a good evening. Hiding the gang war that was heating up in the underbelly of the city from the 'civilized' parts of it was a tough balancing act, even without the flow of people for Renewal Day. Couldn't ignore it altogether because then it would inevitably spill out of Gerankir, couldn't mobilize the guild and send them down to keep things peaceful because the guild was too busy with security work, couldn't make a big spectacle of crushing the gangs because she didn't know if there were any powerful classers lurking down there. The last thing anyone wanted was to piss off a living calamity enough that they didn't care for collateral anymore. Ordering guilders to eliminate the gangs indiscriminately was just asking for several aboveground neighbourhoods to be flattened.

The gangs didn't know how strong the security guild and enforcers really were beyond the famous big names like herself, and vice versa. That mutual lack of knowledge was the delicate lynchpin upon which the tenuous balance of power in New Delport rested.

That was not to say that there was nothing that Valdima could do about it, but what she could do was limited and required paperwork. Paperwork was not something Valdima enjoyed usually but it let her skip the obnoxious event that Lady Ayn's gatherings were. Being paraded as the city's fifth human to reach empyreal status was not her idea of a fun time. That was what she thought, but an hour in, she was not sure that the High Councilor showing her around to impress foreign dignitaries was necessarily worse than this.

And then Ayn contacted her and her day worsened. Somehow the Godtouched brat had managed to reveal her nature to Lady Ayn. That was another point of frustration, and it too, was not something that she could order killed. Well, not without inviting the ire of the very gods. Empyreal or not, she was not going to do that barring a very specific set of circumstances.

"Well, yes, she is indeed Godtouched but I want her out of the city. Do we really need the trouble that someone like her even existing will bring to the city?"

"My dear Val, you are mistaken. The trouble has already arrived. Had for a long time. Just do an old friend a favor and be prepared for things to go south tonight."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Ayn didn't answer and simply disconnected but the answer came nonetheless when a barrier of flame engulfed the Illustris Palace and reports of Kobolds of Kalist himself attacking people on the streets started arriving. She knew that she should have had Sevarius killed when he suggested that asinine idea.

Even with my eyes covered by a thin layer of meat, the flash was bright enough to make me see white. Medea's eyes were better than mine, not even counting the obstruction, and it could see the barrier turn white before returning to its original color. Maybe a bit dimmer but certainly not significantly damaged. Beyond the barrier, it couldn't make out Valdima but the golden sparkles of lightning were unmistakably her's.

Ayn slumped before darting away when the barrier did not shatter as expected. The battle resumed in earnest but now with the metal man and Valdima both hammering away at the dome. Vinny's body moved out of Medea's sight as Kalist gave chase to Ayn. I switched over to mana sight and it was beautiful, terrifying but beautiful. It was like there was rain, not the pleasant kind, but rather the kind that accompanied hurricanes and tropical superstorms. Countless drops of mana racing so quickly as to become streaks and lines of light. One moment they would flow one way and then change direction. Beyond the haze of energetically oscillating mana, I could see glowing blobs of color. Other people, kobolds, maybe even Kalist. But the veil of disturbed magic made it impossible to tell who was who and if any movement was real or just a distortion of perception. With a disappointed sigh that was impossible to vocalize, I resumed seeing merely the physical.

That was when my mana started refilling. Blood. Fresh blood, rich in mana and life. Medea was still paralysed from the mana pulse but it could hear and it was not hard to figure out what happened. Somehow the kobolds recovered first and were now slaughtering people. From the sounds of combat, many of the guests had recovered and were putting up a fight but just as many were too slow and were dead. Oh well, their blood wasn't being used by them anymore. First order of business was restarting my hearts, obviously, and then I went looking for a functional set of eyes in my mass.

Medea was petrified and thus useless, and I was honestly terrified that if I tried to remove the rest of the flesh around my eyes, I would accidentally scrape my brain so I needed a different set of eyes to see now that the kobolds were hostile and I didn't have anything to defend myself with.

The eye rolled down an arm like it was liquid, flesh splitting and stitching itself back like a zipper while cilia pushed the optic along, before resting on the back of the hand. Optic nerves stretched and joined with other optic nerves to create a chain from it to my brain. It opened and swiveled and I could see again. The arm was better than a frozen Medea but only three full joints were not enough. The arm swiveled so that I could survey my body. It was even worse than I expected. The arm with the eye on it grabbed one of the discarded arms and they combined, bone melding and fingers calcifying into a new knee-like structure. The eye flowed downwards again. I repeated the process three times until I had a long prehensile… I couldn't call it an arm, a leg or even a tail so 'limb' must suffice. I had a long prehensile limb with an eye at its end to look around with. I imagine that I probably looked like a particularly messed up kobold to anyone who wasn't looking out for the flame. That was a problem. My hand brushed up against another corpse and I drained it of all its blood just so that I could transplant the voice box, lungs and mouth to the appendage so that I could speak. Once— no, if I survived this nonsense, my first priority was going to be buying that blood cultivation skill from the Emporium.

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The rest of that poor guy's body went into strengthening the appendage and the ribs and other extraneous bones were shaved to an edge and angled to jut out of the tentacle like spikes. Bones, especially those I touched, still benefited from my combat skills so it was a no brainer. I had a spiked tentacle thing to beat people with. The other two eyes went on the tentacle in different places in case one of them was damaged or something got into the blindspot of the one at the end. I couldn't heal, not truly, I could graft flesh and shape biomass to fix injuries but that failed for anything as complex as recreating an eye or combating infection. Even then, I had a weapon now and that meant I was not helpless.

The kobolds seemed to be busy either gorging themselves on struggling people or fighting but I could see some of the smaller ones scavenging around for the dead. I picked a particularly weak looking one and swung my appendage at it with as much strength as my hastily rearranged muscles could exert.

Runi moaned. The mana pulse from the mad dragon had paralyzed her and the two kobolds that she was hiding from, it had also dispersed the illusion she had weaved to make them attack each other. Stuck in stasis beyond their control, two sets of melting eyes glared hatefully at the vampire while she awaited her no doubt painful death. The Night Empress fluttered helplessly around her, somehow recovering movement faster than anyone else but still without any mana to actually use.

The first to recover was the lankier of the kobolds. A twitch and it was advancing towards her with murder in its eyes. A blur of black collided heavily with its face and it shook its head in confusion. Another thwack and it was pushed back. The third time, it caught its assailant.

The large black moth twitched and struggled in the claws of the kobolds as it crushed it. White hemolymph dribbled out from between its fingers and it shook the remains of the moth clean before advancing once again with a snarl that didn't seem to originate from the mouth but rather a gash on its collar.

Runi might have cried, but the foreign mana within was just not letting her move her body. Navisha was here to be sold but that didn't mean that she didn't love the insect and evidently, she thought morosely while staring at the white caking the Kobold's hand, that love was reciprocated.

The thing about being paralyzed like that before imminent death was that she couldn't even close her eyes in acceptance, no, she had to watch.

The kobold seemed to take its sweet time reaching her, and that was weird because she was sure that kobolds weren't sapient enough to savor the terror of their victims, maybe these were something different? The oddity left her mind, along with everything else that wasn't just pain, when the creature finally reached her and took a bite out of her collar. Pain exploded and her vision went cloudy as blood and tears filled it up.

The kobold didn't seem to care to kill her, no it was adamant on eating her while she was still alive. That seemed particularly awful. And then the other kobold joined in and chomped at an arm.

She didn't know what happened but a moment before she lost consciousness, she swore she saw a pink fleshy something rise up behind the two.

The flesh thing lashed out and one of the kobolds was gone, just like that, curved spikes of white impaling its body in numerous places and holding it in place while the thing slammed itself violently against the floor, the walls and even other kobolds. What she did not notice were tiny finger-like cilia on the underside of the thing brushing against the ground and picking up Navisha's remains or wrenching open the Kobold's mouth to retrieve her own flesh.

When she woke up, the two kobolds were gone and she wasn't bleeding anymore. Her wounds weren't healed properly, it just looked like skin was stretched over to arrest blood loss but she was alive. The fleshy appendage was looking over her. Up close she could see that it was covered in jagged spiky bones. The end was thick, almost as thick as her and she stared, a slit opened up to reveal what was a proper mouth with teeth and tongues.

"I've healed you up as much as I could but you need help. Move to the gambling rooms, people are using that as a safe barricade room." Before she could ask for more details or even what the hell the fleshy thing was, it turned away. In the distance, she could see another of the fleshy things fighting a particularly massive kobold with a guy who used beams of blue light. She rose shakily to her feet and began limping to safety.

I watched in curiosity as the formerly crushed wings flapped experimentally. The night empress moth was dead but I could use it and that meant keeping it fresh so I did what I had done with the human corpses and integrated it within my new body (no new class factor!). It was also fortunate that I had vampire DNA here. They worked together well. I think I could create something decent with all this once I was in a different place.

I hoped no one was going to get on my case later for… reappropriating bodies like that. I mean they shouldn't, I was saving people, wasn't I? I altered the rib spikes a bit more, creating hollow tubes within that would drain blood on contact and tested it on a small kobold that I was constantly harassing but not attacking only for testing purposes. It shrieked and howled but soon enough, it started to shrivel up. I tossed the kobold body in disgust. I couldn't absorb the flesh and Medea couldn't, either. But whatever blood they still held did give me some mana.

Oddly enough, this was kind of fun. Being powerful for once, feeling the levels roll in because I was punching above my weight class. I could get addicted to this. An involuntary giggle escaped one of my tendrils and someone stared at me with a very strange look.

Right focus. Crazy, possibly omnicidal dragon first. My weird hang ups about being at the mercy of others later.

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