Getting marooned at the bottom of the ocean in a crippled submarine with rapidly dwindling supplies can be surprisingly peaceful.

  I mean, it’s quiet, at least. Lots of hours to reflect on the long list of mistakes you might have made. Quality time spent with an attractive cambion who is bafflingly interested in you despite your inorganic glass form.

  And sure, Gillow’s out there somewhere, potentially preparing to enact their revenge by murdering us and taking back their ship. Technically, a void monster is fused to my soul and is capable of controlling my mind at any moment. I suppose it could be said that we have no control over our ship, nor a way to replenish the food and air supplies for Zyneth, nor can we predict when teleporting sea serpents might attack us without warning.

  But given the circumstances, it could be worse. At least we’re both still alive.

  Actually, alive might be debatable, in my case.

  Remember, no eating the magic, I tell the predator. This is for my renewal spell, understood? We need it to keep from ending up Between.

  The predator grumbles from inside my head, not very pleased by the prospect of leaving my magic alone, but at least aware of the consequences if it touches it.

  Okay, good, I say, still a little suspicious. It’s like an untrained dog. While I’m staring it down, I know it might not have the courage to snatch food from the table, but I don’t trust it not to try the second my back is turned.

  “Ready?” Zyneth asks from his seat at the helm. His hands are outstretched in my direction, already beginning to glow with the faint yellow of his magic.

  I’m standing in the middle of a spell circle I’ve drawn on the main deck of the Prismatic, the only part of the ship large enough for a spell circle that can accommodate my form. I mean, I could just make a smaller circle, one sized to my vial, but over the past few days, as I’ve been stitching my broken body back together (albeit a much more thin and frail form given all the glass I lost in Emrox,) I made the long-overdue decision to fix my core into the chest of my glass body like a little magical heart.

  My chest. My body. It’s still a weird mental adjustment to make. This body isn’t temporary anymore. This is it. Which means I need to start focusing on turning it into the most ideal form I can—materials permitting.

  “Ready,” I tell Zyneth. “Just laying out the ground rules with my passenger.”

  “It won’t take all my mana this time?” he asks. “Because at some point we’re going to need it for something else. Like not dying.”

  “This will not be a repeat of last time,” I say, turning an inward glare toward the predator. Right?

  It dignifies my accusation with a disgruntled growl. Good enough, I guess.

  “Okay,” I say. “Here we—”

  I lurch to the side as the room pitches sideways, and only the void saves me from shattering against the wall. Zyneth clutches his chair as I dislodge myself from the nest of black tentacles that have sprung up from beneath my cloak and grabbed every available surface.

  Outside the window, giant plate-sized suckers are pressed to the glass. “Oh, for the love of—”

  “Looks like we’ve got company,” Zyneth says, hands flying over the controls.

  I stumble upright and lurch my way over the slanted floor to the nearest chair, where I can tap into the Prismatic’s weapons systems. “Can we not catch one fucking break?!”

  “Technically, we’ve had several quiet days without any attacks,” Zyneth says. “Likely due to your spell at Emrox clearing the surrounding waters of null arcana. But now that it’s had time to reaccumulate—”

  “That was rhetorical, Zyneth!” I strap myself into the seat and slam my hands down on spell circles, blue lines of magic swirling into existence and shining distortedly through my glass. Two new entities appear in my mind: the controls for two of the ship’s giant mechanical tentacles. I unfurl them from the back of the ship and bring them around to get a good look at what’s grabbed onto us.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The predator stirs with eager anticipation as we catch sight of the creature. Attached to the front of the Prismatic like some sort of horrific, wriggling tumor is a massive cluster of tentacles, like a whole school of octopi got scaled up and squished together.

  (Octopuses? Octopi? Is ‘school’ even the right term?)

  Either way, it’s some kind of gross eldritch abomination.

  “Alright, I can see it,” I tell Zyneth. “It’s big, but it looks pretty squishy, so I don’t think it’ll give us too much trouble. Let me just—”

  I pull two strands of void from beneath my cloak, intending to tap into two more of the Prismatic’s limbs. But before I have a chance to activate the additional spell circles, the void pulls away from me, and a mental concussion slaps through my mind like a punch to the gut. I double over as the void snaps away from all my limbs, the predator grinning in my head as the void darts through the room and vanishes into the ship.

  Zyneth turns, alarmed. “Was that the predator? What is it doing?”

  Trying not to panic, I wonder the same. Left without a drop of void to reinforce my joints, my glass body suddenly feels rickety and unstable; it’s a good thing I’m strapped to the chair, or I might have collapsed from the sudden absence.

  The predator doesn’t care about any of this. I can feel its excited dash through the ship, arriving in the cargo bay before plunging out one of the windows and into the ocean. It only has one thing on its mind: slaughter the beast attached to our hull.

  “Uh, it’s just helping,” I tell Zyneth, trying not to sound as alarmed as I feel. The predator tears into the beast with sadistic glee, ripping its limbs apart. “Getting some pent-up energy out, I think.”

  “Oh,” Zyneth says hesitantly. “That’s good. Right?”

  “Yeah.” But truthfully, I’m shaken. It moved so quickly, with such force, I didn’t even have a chance to react. I have no control over it. It’s an untamed animal, bored and hungry, and if it ever arbitrarily decides to turn its bloodlust onto Zyneth, I don’t know if I could stop it. At least it’s left him alone so far; some of my attachment to Zyneth has filtered into the predator enough for it to treat him as an ally, I think. But what happens when I get back to land? What will I do when we’re surrounded by people instead of sea monsters?

  I can feel the thrill of elation when the predator reaches the creature’s soul and pounces on it. Teeth of void tear through it in seconds, and the predator pulls the scraps of soul into its void, absorbing the energy in three gluttonous bites. Alarmed, I Check my Influence stat, but it remains stable at 50%. Instead, the excess magic the predator absorbed alters a different stat.

  [Predator Time Limit: 167 hours]

  I relax slightly. I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of distracting the predator long enough to get its magic stores to run out. I recover enough mana at this point that it can continuously siphon enough points off of me to keep itself from ever timing out. If eating sea monster souls just boosts a semi-irrelevant stat instead of causing it to gain Influence over me, I can live with that.

  In the end, I don’t even need to use the ship’s limbs. The predator completely shreds the tentacle monster in a matter of minutes, leaving the surrounding waters clouded with viscera and fish meat.

  “Well,” Zyneth says at length, staring out the window. “At least it can be said it’s an effective sea creature deterrent.”

  That’s an understatement.

  As the predator finally bores of shredding small bits of flesh into even smaller pieces, it finally slinks back toward the ship. It would have liked to go hunting for more, but the waters surrounding the ship are as far as it can venture, given its range is still anchored to my core. That’s one small blessing, I suppose.

  Echo blips into my mind as the predator spills back into the ship.

  [EXP Threshold met. Level up! Class Evolution unlocked.]

  [Name: Kanin]

  [Class: Wizard (Pending Evolution)]

  [Level: 20]

  [HP: 10/10]

  [Temp HP: 197]

  [Mana: 200/200]

  [Role: Homunculus]

  Well, what do you know? The predator killing things counts toward my experience as well. Is that because it’s tied to my soul? Or because my Attuned void is mixed in with its essence?

  “Hey, Zyneth,” I say, calling his attention away from the gory visage still floating outside the window. As I do so, the predator makes it back to the deck, slinking into the room. I pause, and both of us stare, as the creature flows back over to me. It’s like looking at a picture you can’t quite bring into focus. One moment it appears to be made of shadow, and the next it almost seems more like tar. It could be a puddle of oil, but then it takes a step, and it almost seems to have a wolfish form. Maybe it’s all these things at once, and this is the only way my mind can think to interpret it.

  The predator flows back beneath my cloak in a frankly creepy display, then I feel the void fall back within my control once more. Uneasily, I patch up my joints, and hide the rest away in the shadows of my coat, as the predator mentally curls up for a self-satisfied nap.

  How is this my life?

  “Uh, anyway,” I say awkwardly, as Zyneth continues to stare. “I was going to say, it looks like I’ve got a class evolution option.”

  He tears his eyes away from my coat, gaze lifting to my face, despite the fact that I don’t really have one. “A what?” he asks.

  “A class evolution,” I say. “I think it will give me some new abilities. It might help with… well, everything.”

  “What sorts of new abilities?” Zyneth asks, reclining in the chair and appearing to relax a fraction.

  What are my class evolution options? I ask Echo.

  She lays them all out for me.

  If I had eyes, I’d be rolling them.