A few minutes after saving the vampire, Runi if my memory was not wrong, I abandoned manually killing smaller kobolds and instead started looking for more biomass. Medea had recovered enough to keep the weaker kobolds off my too many backs while I focused on further changing myself. I somehow managed to finagle a set of short sturdy tendrils with flat tips to walk around with. It was not efficient. It didn't look good either, and it was slow but at least I could move again.

And that meant that I could try to make my way to the gambling rooms in slow lumbering steps. I mean, I could try to get rid of all that extra meat but something told me that an impromptu full body surgery on myself in an active battlefield was pushing luck that I didn't have. At least the stairs and such were big, wide and sturdy to accommodate the body-types of so many different types of classers so I wasn't in danger of falling through because I was too heavy. At least I hoped, anyways.

The weaker kobolds were easy pickings for experience but I didn't want to either test myself against the hulking newcomers that prowled the skies and the exits or hang around long enough for one of them to come after me.

The barrier above had finally shattered under the combined assault of Valdima and the metal man, who I now recognized as another of the high councillors but instead of salvation, it just brought in even more kobolds. Not a ton of weak to middling ones but a few very strong ones. Kalist, who was now barely even humanoid, was still engaged in battle but the battle had moved on from above us to across the city. One of my eye tendrils stretched upright so that I could watch the city over the edges. Every so often, someplace else would light up in the yellow-orange of Kalist or the gold of Ayn and Valdima and it would illuminate the smog clouds that the palace lorded over. Like a physically identical inverse of how lightning lights up storm clouds.

The battle had to be raging all across the city, judging by the flashes and how far each was to the next. These were monsters, moving miles in moments. From the veil of the smog, it was impossible to tell who was winning but one thing I was certain of was that Kalist wasn't capable of simply crushing the other two and however many others that had joined in after the barrier came down.

And yet, Kalist had left the bulk of his surviving forces here. But these didn't seem to be as actively offensive, rather just content to kill anyone who stayed in one place for too long or tried to escape. I would say that he was keeping us as hostages but then why run off to fight Ayn? Nothing about it made any sense.

I sent out a new tendril to a kobold that tried to attack me, this time combining an old skill with a new one to change the bone spikes into smaller hollow barbed hooks. I had seen and heard a lot of messed up things in my life but I think instantly flaying and tearing out pieces of the skin of a living creature was probably up near the top of it. The kobold blinked stupidly at the ragged hide before it, as if unable to believe what it was seeing before another tendril crushed it. Better than the regular ones for smaller kobolds but probably better to keep a couple of the old ones in reserve.

I was not lucky enough to avoid notice all the way but there was a difference between either me or Medea fighting alone and together. The kobold was strong. Stronger than the other's we'd killed so far but one severed and then reattached tendril, one crushed wing and a torn out throat out of several, later, I had enough experience to master my class. I didn't have anything else that was very high level so I just took the level 15 [FLESHGRAFTER]. No new skills but that suited me just fine. I didn't have an infinite number of slots. I was just happy with how much experience these kobolds gave me.

After what felt like an age and a quick detour to the pets room to integrate anything that was dead, I was looking at a slab of dark crystal with straight bronze lines on it. The lines often split with one continuing straight onwards and another turning 90 degrees to make crude boxes with sides missing or sides having several slightly differently sized lines on them. Beyond the crystal was the gambling room.

When I approached, an orb of light materialized in front of the slab and I had the sense that it was glaring at me. A slow building up of energy made my hairs stand on their ends. I raised my original tendrils and spoke.

"Stop. I'm not a kobold." The build up lessened but it did not go away altogether.

"You could be an anomaly. A smart kobold." The orb rumbled. I didn't even know that smart kobolds were a thing.

"I'm not. If you have a vampire named Runi inside, you can ask her! I saved her and told her to come here." The eye didn't speak for a minute and then the bronze lines started to straighten out and move as the black crystal split down the middle like a set of double-doors.

"Come in. And be quick." A voice called out. Behind me, the crystal slammed shut again and closed. The gambling rooms were totally overhauled with the counters and the booth partitions all gone. The tables were still there but now they held mugs of fisjoui and Aetherite crystals. I could see almost everyone was using a few crystals to make weapons or heal injuries. It didn't look like a bunch of people hiding from the monsters outside. It almost looked like they were preparing for a fight…

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"Can I have crystals? This body is breaking down." I asked.

"Fine. So what the hell happened to you?" A middle aged man asked as he led deeper into the gambling rooms.

"I'm a biomancer. I was fighting." That was the truth and didn't really reveal anything more than I wanted to. The man raised an eyebrow but didn't comment. As we passed one of the tables, I saw a familiar face. Fim. He sent me a nod of acknowledgement before downing what was pretty obviously far too much alcohol. How did I know that? His face was flushed and he didn't even notice it when I swiped a bottle from him.

"Alright, so here are all the crystals that we won't miss. Just fix yourself up for now and pick something a bit more mobile. We'll be breaking out in 30." He pointed to a frankly absurd pile of crystals but my attention was drawn to what he had just said.

"Wait, what?"

The plan was simple. One of the classers here had a teleporting skill but transporting so many people at once required a massive expenditure of mana. An expenditure that would make them light up like a beacon to every single kobold out there. Personally, I would have been content to wait them out but the man said something about extended mana exposure and infection using mana theory jargon that I simply didn't know. Fight it was then.

So far my original body practically died against a simple kobold and I had, with effort, managed to subdue a somewhat stronger variant, but the ones keeping us in the palace were simply too powerful. Keeping the teleporter safe was going to be a tough task but so was even keeping myself alive.

With a sigh, I began to work.

Fahria Shakirn nursed a cup of fisjoui while she waited for her mana to naturally regenerate. She was relatively unharmed by the events of the night if her ego was not to be counted.

Her hand tightened around the mug until it almost shattered at that memory but she was fine, she was alive. And that meant that she could have revenge. Maybe it was her imagination but for a single moment when she almost gave into that rage, her mana seemed to refill faster. Likely her imagination considering that her status remained unchanged.

She glared daggers silently as Elstrad lounged around at a separate table, not even glancing at her. Flames flickered to life before extinguishing themselves over and over again at the tips of her clawed fingers. A keener observer than Fahria would have noticed that the sparks turned blood red just before going out.

Fim didn't care anymore. He would be fine if he lived or if he died. It didn't matter anymore. Vinny was dead. His boss was dead. And once the gang got things back in order, he was likely going to join them in death.

Memories flitted across her mind like a half-remembered dream. Memories that were her but not her. It was a tumor. The tumor that dreamed of being a cathedral.

A different world. Great towers of glass. Fallen to bone. A pact with an old horror. Being a simple moth sacrificing herself to save a friend. No, that wasn't the tumor. It was her. But who was she? Maybe she was the tumor all along. That made sense. But then what was the thing that she thought was the tumor? Nothing made sense. If she wasn't the tumor then why were her memories so simple compared to the vividness of that destroyed world. She was the tumor but the other one was mother. How did she know that? She just did. It was not a rational thought. It was just what was ingrained in her being just as much as she knew how to flat her wings.

Lights.

Flashes of lights were all she could see.

A cold blue light that seemed to strip her to her soul to examine it. Clinically, detached. If the light found her wanting, it would extinguish her existence. The light that symbolized the old horror.

An image rose to her mind. The old horror, a mass without distinction other than a blue light that gazed upon all. 'A lighthouse', the piece of her that was also mother supplied helpfully.

The light found her lacking.

It was not a nice light.

The clone died.

I had tried to combine a night empress with a spider scorpion to see if I could make another general for my swarm. My first attempt was grafting a spider scorpion hatchling and the moth together but it failed miserably once that blue light showed up. I had seen that blue light before. It first appeared when I had made Medea my familiar and then when I met with the Third Calamity herself.

She had called me a thief then but yet it was unmistakably her gaze that was upon me right now. I think I really don't like dragons, be they ascended ones or trueborns. Morosely, I ripped out the moth and integrated it within me again. I didn't touch the spider-scorpion because I still believed that a proper biomancer could fix me as I was now. Adding in a spider scorpion's evolution powers was going to complicate that, if not make it downright impossible.

I was still a messed up collection of fleshy tentacles but my actual body was almost cat-like. If cats were longer and wider than Valdima and were asymmetrical hulks of hardened scar tissue and exposed tendons with tentacles lining their backs. I was a cat if cats had armored bony featureless domes where the head should be, saw with eyes lining their tentacles, and had several parallel skeletons just to withstand the sheer muscle density without snapping whenever they flexed. It was much better than the shambling pile I was earlier but that was the best thing I could say about it. At least it, combined with my ill-fated attempt to create a new Swarm General, were enough to get me another class mastery.

Someone cleared their throat and the voice magically carried far.

"We will start in 5. Be ready and ensure that you have enough mana. If you need more crystals then come to me."

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