While I waited for divine inspiration to take pity and finally strike me – or just a bolt of lightning. That would work, too – I took off into the sky and circled back towards the kaiju. I caught up pretty quickly because at least building-sized spiders aren’t very good at hiding. As I approached, it shoulder-checked its way through yet another building, then paused and reared up as Yuki popped out of nowhere and tried to stab it in the eye. The kaiju filed and stomped at her, ripping up the street and the buildings around it, but Yuki managed to avoid its filing until –

  Nope. It got her. I winced in sympathy as one gigantic, spiked leg back-handed (back-legged? Kicked?) her like it wanted to score a home run. God, that one must have really hurt. Yuki was gone so fast, I hadn’t even seen her fly off.

  Wait, that wasn’t what happened. Right as the kaiju swung, another Yuki dropped out of the sky on the other side of the kaiju – ooooh. The first was a decoy that Jun had conjured to distract the spider, and it worked. With the kaiju wide open, Yuki took the opportunity to go for a clean, unobstructed hit at a different eye.

  Which also didn’t work.

  I watched Yuki stab down in frustration once, twice, and then three more times before she had to jump backwards to avoid kaiju leg. As she fell, she did some sort of improbable mid-air momentum-shifting thing to dance around the strands of webbing the kaiju shot at her, and then vanished in a swirl of shadows. A moment ter, she and Jun appeared just long enough to give me a jaunty wave and a flick of Jun’s tail.

  “Good luck, loser!” Yuki shouted from behind me, and then they were gone. It was just me, a pissed-off kaiju I couldn’t hurt, and a skyrocketing city reconstruction bill.

  Yaaaaay.

  Well, it wasn’t currently pissed at me, and it wasn’t like anything I could think of was stopping it, so maybe I had a moment to hit the books. I pinged Serenity Paradox for anything I could possibly use and sorted through the answers as I flew.

  There wasn’t a lot there. Mostly, it listed some variations on shooting the kaiju more, which, no. More firepower wasn’t working, and I wasn’t nearly desperate enough to try getting inside the kaiju to see if its armor was one-way or two.

  So, other options. Run it out of magical energy? Maybe, but if its continued resilience was any indication, its reserve had to be staggering. Really, the only reason I wasn’t getting more help on this had to be because even though the kaiju’s specs were unreal, it wasn’t very aggressive. Just, you know, giant-spider-in-a-city levels of destructive. If it had shown any more offensive capacity than just stomping around, it’d be upgraded to Tier 2, easily.

  But, considering the kind of power the kaiju had to have for a Tier 2 defense, exhausting it went to the bottom of the list. It wasn’t really shooting anything back at me, so I wasn’t going to get the chance to redirect one of its own hits, and my own efforts were doing jack diddly to wear it out while pying defense.

  Could I move it somewhere? Well, maybe, but I didn’t have a convenient spellform for that, and it was really just kicking the can down the road.

  Appease it? Probably not. It didn’t really seem to want anything except to wander and be left alone.

  Which left… Waiting it out and keep begging for help. Fuck.

  God, this was going to suck. I was getting fired, for sure. Could a Chosen even get fired? Was I going to set precedent and be the first?

  Well, nothing to it but to get to work while I waited to find out. Maybe if I annoyed it enough, I could trick the kaiju into doing something nastier. Either that might score me some real back-up – get fucked, Yuki – or it might give me some kind of clue or something.

  I was part-way through lining up a Bst Shot at the kaiju’s eyes, mostly to say I was still trying, when I gnced back at the list of possible attack options.

  Wait, what was that st one?

  There was one entry left on the list of possibilities Serenity Paradox had prepared. I’d almost overlooked it because Serenity had greyed it out, like it didn’t think it was possible. Which was curious, because it had opened the list with shooting a bunch of magic at the kaiju even though I already knew that wouldn’t work.

  Serenity fshed dimly, like it was reluctant to follow my request. The line of text expanded into a series of formue, which I skimmed through.

  It was massive stuff. Almost over my head in complexity. But I started picking out pieces. Healing? No – some kind of matter generation being fed from… soul resonance? But from an incomplete soul being – what? Reassembled? And there was some kind of bond creation linked to magic energy transference and…

  It clicked into pce.

  It was a familiar ritual.

  Serenity thought I could make a kaiju my familiar. Like, what in the even…?

  Serenity fshed. It was a terrible idea, which is why it hadn’t wanted to show me. It was just, you know, maybe technically possible.

  Well, it hadn’t been proven impossible.

  Okay, I wasn’t going to kid myself. It was absolutely impossible. And even if it wasn’t, it was the dumbest idea I’d heard in, like, ever. The power requirements alone would be astronomical, but without that power, there would be no uplifting the base creature into sentience, and I certainly didn’t have the throughput to do it.

  Well… theoretically, it didn’t have to come from me. And the kaiju’s stores were massive....

  But that left the – well, no. Soul size and density doesn’t have any corretion to physical size. If I was copying parts of my soul to project into the kaiju’s, I only needed the power to create something as dense as my own metaphysical weight, minus a little because I wasn’t even copying the whole thing.

  And reconstructing the body wouldn’t be a problem – the thing was huge. We’d have materials to spare.

  It really didn’t seem sentient, so dropping an uplift on it probably wasn’t unethical?

  And it’d solve the kaiju attack problem, right?

  Was the only real problem that I’d need to be touching it long enough to establish the ritual?

  Serenity Paradox fshed again, even brighter. Okay, yeah, this was going to get me killed. Or fired. Or fired, and then killed by a government hit squad, because who in their right mind would try something this dumb?! No one. That’s who. No one would and, as far as I knew, no one had ever even wanted to. Which, on top of everything else, meant a whole bunch of nasty stuff could happen and I wouldn’t have a clue how to deal with it.

  But maybe it would work…

  And if it did, and I was the first person to do it…

  It was what a good teammate would do, wasn’t it?

  I was already flying towards the kaiju, I realized. I’d looped around the city and come back at a low angle so it couldn’t see me. I wanted to touch down on the top of its abdomen, above the spinnerets but hopefully out of sight and out of reaching. Without anyone harassing it, the kaiju had resumed slowly wandering around. It was still indiscriminately crushing roofs and pavement alike with the weight of its steps, but otherwise, it didn’t seem… angry? I held my breath as I drifted through the firing angles of the spinnerets. I was sure I’d suffocate before anyone could do anything to save me if I got hit with a good bst from the things.

  But nothing came, and the kaiju continued its leisurely pace as I nded softly. Well, almost nded. I was still keeping myself mostly flying because the scuttling gait of the kaiju would absolutely throw me back into the air. But weightless from hovering, the friction of my boots held my mostly in pce as I crouched down.

  Now, time for some work.

  Without Serenity Paradox, I couldn’t have channeled the ritual. I wouldn’t have even tried. It was way too complicated. The most I could do was gather up every scrap of power my Source was spitting out and channel it into spellforms as Serenity guided me. I quickly fell into a zen sort of doze, mindlessly following the instructions in front of me while I tried to keep from overloading myself or destabilizing the ritual.

  I poured more and more power into the ritual, and I could feel it starting to take hold. An extremely uncomfortable feeling ran through me, like a mechanical ghost giving my soul and unnecessarily intimate hug. I shuddered as the ritual took an imprint of my soul.

  And then the ritual was reaching out beyond me. I felt it stretch down through me and into the kaiju I was standing on. I didn’t have the concentration to hold my breath, but I could still feel my body tensing up until… yes! The ritual flowed right on through the kaiju’s carapace and then deeper, questing for whatever nascent shred of a soul it might have. Deeper and deeper it went, searching, and then –

  The kaiju reared up. It’s legs chittered against its fangs and it whirled, stomping and searching for something. It didn’t know where I was or what I was doing, but it could still feel the ritual as it began connecting us. As our connection deepened, I began to feel it scrambling around, hunting for its unseen assaint. I flowed with it as it moved, listening to its soul sing in colors that didn’t have names.

  Aggression.

  Panic. Fear.

  Attack! Searching. Attack!

  Attention!

  Enemy found.

  Rage.

  Oh, shitbiscuits.

  Like any spider, the kaiju had eyes circling its head, and while reared up, it could see the top of its abdomen. It might have only been barely aware enough to understand that I was a threat, but it still had some rudimentary survival instincts. I watched through the kaiju’s eyes as it raised up one of its legs to crush me, helpless to do anything to save myself while locked into the familiar ritual.

  Its legs swung and stomped, but I had guessed right. It just couldn’t quite reach me. It filed and swung its abdomen around, but the ritual had bound us fast. We were connecting on more than just a physical level, and soon, there wouldn’t ever be any distance between us again.

  Deeper, it wound us together. More and more, I lost myself, lost even my sense of what the kaiju was feeling, as the ritual itself pulled me in. Any sense of my body, or even the kaiju’s faded out.

  And then we met.

  I saw its reserve first. It was massive, so much bigger than I’d thought, like an entire ocean of power waited below me. I gaped, unthinking. How could anything this vast exist? Where had this kaiju even come from?

  Above the sea of power, like a mist, floated its consciousness. It was diffuse, only barely together enough to sustain a sense of self. I watched the ritual tug and pull, condensing and coalescing the mist down into a tighter and tighter ball. A truly nascent soul, ready to be given form.

  Power fred through us as the kaiju’s soul began to approach the density of my own. It was too small, too simple. If the ritual hadn’t been forcibly compressing it, it wouldn’t have held together at all. But as energy flooded out of me and through the framework of the ritual, the tiny ball of a soul began taking on a new shape. Not a copy of me, not at all. Its own being, something entirely new, using what I was as a pathway to stimute its growth.

  I felt the kaiju’s new soul finally lock into pce, connected and self-sustaining. Perceptions flickered throughout it as the entity that was becoming my familiar first truly awoke to its metaphysical surroundings. It was beautiful to watch, a sight completely beyond words.

  And then we fell back. Back from the space in our souls, now indelibly tethered, towards the physical space we’d left behind. The kaiju was preparing to become whatever it was going to be, while I slowly returned to the body I’d left behind.

  All at once, the weight of carrying the familiar ritual hit me, and it was staggering. If I hadn’t already been kneeling on the kaiju, I would have fallen. Instead, I was lucky enough to colpse face first onto the carapace below me.

  The impact was muted and dull, like I’d fallen onto a pillow, not thick chitin. If I’d had more presence of mind, that would have definitely worried me, but I had even bigger concerns. If I had entered the ritual fresh, I might have done better. But I hadn’t, I’d entered it exhausted, after a grueling battle with the kaiju, and channeling the familiar ritual had tapped into power beyond what I had to spend. A ring of bckness spread around the outer edges of my vision and slowly pulsed further inwards in time with the manic beating of my heart. I could hear my breathing, ragged and thready, as I tried to roll over onto my side. I vaguely remembered that that was how you avoided drowning in your own puke, which seemed relevant to my current situation. Gravity was being a tricky bitch, though, and I couldn’t figure out how to get one shoulder over the other. Fuck, that probably wasn’t good, but it was going to have to be Future Emma’s problem.

  As darkness slowly engulfed me, I felt a final tugging in my soul, and then, suddenly, I could breathe easier. The ritual had handed channeling off to the kaiju, whose reserves were now powering its transformation. Fine. That was fine. It was building itself anew, and I was happy to let it have the wheel. Hopefully, it would remember I was lying on its back before it changed too much – I probably couldn’t survive freefalling four stories.

  Or maybe I could? Who knows. Another problem for Future Emma. Ha! Suck it, Future Emma! You just have to deal! Mic drop. Present Emma, out.