I quickly start shifting. His injured body won't st long.

  Since this is far removed from my chosen if, it will take me a few leaps to get it right. Let me show you the reason why I am at the top of my game:

  The blood pooling beneath King Louis body starts expanding as my vision is. It expands to form a flowing river of red, my mate's injured form floating in its middle.

  My next leap stretches his body to reach across the river. His feet and hands serve as anchors, holding him in pce. The pale, anemic extremities start turning whiter and whiter until my mate's arms and legs end not in hands and feet but blocks of marble.

  Of course, I will not build any old bridge. My mate is too straight. I want my bridge to have some nice arches.

  Here's another pro tip: If your head is not pounding, you do not need to use it for every transformation. Bance is essential. You cannot underuse your head, lest the headaches cause you to uncontrolbly transform the world around you. Overusing your head, however, will make you susceptible to the melodies.

  Right now, I faintly hear a faint |????|??? ?|????|? ???|? ? | pying in my head, but it's purely background instrumentals. I am sure that by the end of the construction, it will be a full-blown opera.

  I use my hands to smash my mate's knees and elbows.

  Although he stopped screaming a while ago, his moans assure me that he is still conscious. I quickly make some changes to his circutory system. With this, he may live through the next leap.

  I arrange his body in a ._/??￣\_. shape. Thanks to his broken joints, this is as simple as using my hands to fixate his bones in the position and then hardening it. I wish to finish my shaping and then transform everything into a suitable material all at once.

  Now, to the coup de grace! I will start shifting his head. Of course, he could not survive what I have pnned. He would die in the shift. That simply won't do! My mate should die by my hand!

  There was a kid in my batch that made a mistake shifting. He was terribly unlucky. While he managed to shift through the bs impossibly thick and dense walls, his attention must have slipped in the middle. When they carried him back inside, he was twitching and hoarsely screaming. And he would not stop.

  They made some brain scans and those showed a two inch or five centimetre spherical piece of the walls stuck in his brain, spt in his dorsal posterior insu. Apparently, if you stick something in just the right spot, it causes an inordinate amount of pain before it kills you.

  The kid in question was not so lucky. Before he could die from having foreign matter stuck in his brain, the scientist called a few of us, myself included, to experiment on him. Our task was to remove the sphere. I managed to do just that. Unfortunately, I also shifted every other "dense, solid" in his body into nothingness, including the hard outer yer of his bones. Thanks to that I learned its name: cortical bone.

  The kid died shortly after.

  Back to the topic, I decided that my mate should die the merciful death the kid had not: closing my eyes to envision the precise location, I shift a sphere into existence and waited. Since he does not have access to air, Louis cannot scream, but his twitching eyes tell me that he would if he could.

  Ten minutes pass before my mate's eyes finally gze over. King Louis is dead.

  Time to finish my construction! My club turns into a sharp machete, and I use it to cut off the dead king's head. Then, I pce it on his torso, right in the middle. One leap, and his skull bones expands to match his torso's width and length. Another leap, and the small brain is stretched and compressed into a thin, almost 2D yer of intriguing patterns. The yer neatly covers the torso.

  Finally, I use my machete to carve a few more patterns into the arms, legs, and sides of the torso. After, I concentrate and prepare to change the material composition of my bridge: the king's arms and legs fuse together, becoming crudely carved sbs of mat white marble. His torso is likewise changed to stones, the thin brain yer turning into a colorful mosaic.

  When I change his skull bones into a marble pavilion, my thoughts are at risk of being drowned out by the waltz pying in my mind...

  I briefly dance out of reality. No longer a humanoid, my new body rhythmically spins in a circle.

  Tak, tak, tak!

  I am a long, bck, thin bde.

  Tak, tak, tak, tak!

  Another four rounds complete, I try to recall my is.

  Do I need to? Dancing to this melody feels natural. If this is not my is, what could be?

  Tak, tak.

  The melody is less overwhelming now. My thoughts spin alongside my body. Spending the rest of my existence here is too dull. As I pull up my memories of the room filled with monstrous flowers, a blood river, and a beautiful(?) marble bridge, the sense of loss and incongruity is... indescribable. If I had a mouth, I would scream.

  Eventually, the vision is stable. Without waiting, I leap.

  Seeing my masterful bridge, I sigh relieved.

  Great, that was a close call. Ok, the melody is still strong. I should let my head rest for a bit. This time it was some kind of dancing bde, but I still remember that time I turned into a line. Losing my sense of reality, even for a moment, is always risky.

  I raise my hand, sure enough, I am humanoid again.

  "Ha ha ha!"

  Fun. That was fun. Coming here was worthwhile.

  Mental checklist:

  1. Find a new body. My current creation won't st long without a bunch of visionary fixes, and I should use my head as little as possible.

  2. Ask that duke who changed him and figure out if they are still in Boge. If they are, their mission might be to kill me after I finish my assassination.

  3. Eat some lobster. I need some good, fresh lobster to lift my mood.

  With renewed vigor, I turn around to see the duke wriggling on the floor. I paralyzed his limbs, so that is about all he can do.

  No matter, I will need to take him along while I go body shopping. I fling the duke over my shoulder and make for the pnt covered exit.