Chapter Fifty-six

  Krissy stopped as the ship lurched. I could hear the muffled sound of the drum from the rowers’ deck above us, the damn ork beating a slow but steady rhythm. The galley was now in gear one; they really were leaving the shores of Solace.

  ‘We’re moving,’ Krissy stated, and wanted to break into a sprint to reach the hatch at the rear end of the ship — the stern, if I remembered the word correctly — but I stopped her.

  ‘What?’ she whispered.

  ‘Let me have a look before we go up,’ I said.

  We were halfway between the hatch and the middle of the hold where we had left the elves. The ceiling wasn’t high, two metres at most, and another half a metre of beams and support structures before one of my tentacles poked through the floorboards of the raised walkway between the rowers’ pits. I moved my spirit-periscope around to get a good look at what was going on up there.

  ‘Okay, they’re rowing, and … damn. The spiritualist ork is out of his hammock,’ I reported my findings, or at least the relevant parts.

  The rowers, the drummer, and the half-naked elves with whips weren’t that big a problem, but the hammock-ork was massive, and so was its familiar. Those guys had to go, and I was thinking a sneak-attack would be better than to climb up and charge.

  I told Krissy to move back a few metres. She did, and we were almost directly under where the spiritualist was standing and enjoying the view of the rowers. I wasn’t in the mood to show any mercy, not after I’d seen what they had in store for the people they kidnapped.

  ‘Alright, stay still, I’ll try to get the spiritualist,’ I said to Krissy.

  She just nodded, and I got to work.

  Another four of my danger-noodles crept up, slowly and carefully, joining the one already spying on the ongoings above us, sticking out just a millimetre. The very orkish-looking, two-armed familiar didn’t seem to notice it as I positioned my tenties under his host’s feet. This was good, this could work. I took a deep, mental breath, and I launched four tenties at the spirit, and one at the ork.

  I was fast. The familiar was faster. The moment I moved my tentacles the spirit noticed them, and he moved so fast I couldn’t react in time. He only had two arms, ending in hands with fingers. It couldn’t chop off my poor appendages, instead, it caught one, then two, then three, then four and five, all in a single second, like an ugly, invisible Flash.

  ‘Run!’ the familiar yelled at his host.

  The ork roared and burst into a sprint immediately — there was none of the confusion or hesitation I had seen before from hosts when hearing their spirit-companions talk. The familiar tried to pull my tenties with him as his host whooshed between the rowers. This startled me so much that for a moment I forgot that I was supposed to eat the ork — I hesitated and it got away. I pulled my tenties back, all of them. They slipped out of the familiars hands, or through them, I wasn’t sure.

  The half-naked elves of course used their whips to remind the slaves that their business was rowing and not gawking at running orks. And that running ork was going to the quarterdeck now to warn everyone about something strange going on down here.

  ‘Shit!’ I swore.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Krissy asked anxiously.

  ‘They got away,’ I moaned.

  ‘Shit! What now?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ I said, cursing myself while trying to think of the next step. And I got it. ‘I hereby nominate you to be the brain of this operation, I’ll just be the muscle.’

  Krissy didn’t miss a beat, and started walking towards the hatch, saying,

  ‘We need to stop the ship.’

  ‘Right. The rowers?’ I inquired.

  ‘The rowers.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘As many as you can.’

  Krissy was right, of course, and I didn’t have a single objection. This was a galley. Sure, it had sails, and I figured it would be the next thing to disable, but the rowers were the main propulsion. They had to go, and if they had to go, what better place was there for them than my spiritual belly. I was somewhat surprised the way Krissy so readily suggested it, though. I didn’t recall telling her about my Tentacle Horror instinct, so it definitely wasn’t a case of her trying to score points with the strange almost-entity — which was already drooling. She was being pragmatic, I concluded, wanting to get the job done, the words of scout-master Dimal probably still echoing in her mind just as they were in mine: “the best we can do for them is to kill them.”

  I stretched my tentacles upward again, fully this time. My seven, immaterial appendages went through to the deck above, reaching for seven of the slaves rowing in unison to the beat of the drum. Seven of them collapsed onto the floor of the rowing pits. Then, as Krissy walked on towards the hatch, I feasted on the souls of the slaves — absorbing them then grabbing new ones. With every step she took, my tentacles could reach more and more of them. Those out of my reach seemed to realise what was happening, and soon enough, their terrified, panicked screams filled the rowers’ deck.

  ***

  The galley was a bloody long ship. The hatch leading up to the rowers’ deck was some twenty metres from the spot where my failed assassination attempt had taken place. It took Krissy about twenty seconds to get there. In those twenty seconds I decimated the rowers’ ranks in that stretch, mostly on one side. They were defenseless against my tentacles. Slaves, chained to their spots, unable to flee, just rowing and rowing. I tried to feel guilty about the slaughter I was committing, I tried to feel at least a little bad for those humans, but I couldn’t. Instead, for once, I gave in to the infectiously good mood of my Tentacle Horror instinct, and I reveled in the EXP I was getting. This ship was a great place to be.

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  7 times 40 EXP. Then 4 times 40 EXP. I caught one of the elves: 1 time 65 EXP. Then 5 times 40 EXP. Then 7 times 40 EXP again. Almost a thousand EXP , all in a mere twenty seconds. Whoever said the death of one man was a tragedy, the death of a million statistics, wasn’t wrong. An evil, cruel bastard by any standards, but not wrong. It was easy to think of the rowers as numbers in the EXP column on an imaginary spreadsheet. I was good with numbers. What did this make me? I knew better than to start thinking about it. Just a spirit doing spirit things.

  I welcomed the sensation of getting full, and by the time Krissy climbed up the ladder and set foot on the rowers’ deck once again, I knew I wasn’t going to level just once.

  The deck was in chaos. Rows upon rows of slaves shouting and screaming, yanking on their chains trying to break free, their oars abandoned, the bodies of those I had killed strewn about among them. Interestingly, that ork somewhere in the middle of the deck, was still beating its drum, providing the background music for the scene, while a few elves were doing their best to restore order with their whips.

  The closest of the elves, some ten metres from us, noticed Krissy as she clambered up through the hatch and stood on the deck. I immediately activated Mana-Armour around her. The elf ran at her with an orkish-sounding battle-cry, lashing at her with the whip. Krissy drew her sword. The whip panged off the layer of Mana. The elf drew a dagger with his free hand, and jumped the last two metres, aiming his weapon at my host’s head. Or neck, I couldn’t really tell. The elf clearly wasn’t a trained fighter; his noisy, feral charge looked laughable next to the silent, ranger-style efficiency with which Krissy dodged the attack, then slashed at the man’s neck. She didn’t even use Mana for it, and the elf slumped to the floor, his neck squirting blood, his head half-separated from the rest of him. Another 60ish EXP for me.

  I was close. Very, very close to Level 32. Just a few more souls, a hundred or so EXP, and I was there. Krissy took a step forward on the raised walkway, holding her bloodied sword up, looking left and right at the screaming slaves in the rowers’ pits. Some of them saw her, some just trying to escape, some dead.

  Krissy stopped and looked left, as three out of five rowers on the same oar dropped dead, the remaining two freezing up, staring into her misery mask.

  This was the last 120 EXP I needed. I was full.

  ‘Is this necessary? No-one’s rowing, we’ve stopped the ship,’ Krissy asked, her voice calm in a weird way.

  ‘No, not for the ship. It’s for me,’ I explained. ‘We have four familiars up there. I need to be ready.’

  ‘Understood,’ she said, nodding. ‘Do what you have to.’

  She didn’t have to tell me twice. I was ready to grow.

  Spiritual Tentacle Horror Level 31 to Level 32.

  ***

  I wanted to grow the basketball sized blob my main body was. I wanted to expand my Spirit Room. I wanted my Essence and Mana pools to grow. I wanted Jack’s Room to … actually, Jack’s Room was large enough already, and I wasn’t planning to expand it. But no matter how I looked at it, the immediate necessity was tentacles. More and longer tenties. With four spiritualists waiting for us up top — if not more — or possibly on the way down here already, I needed more of the wiggly, noodley buggers. My Tentacle Horror instinct was nodding in agreement with all the enthusiasm it could throw at me. Plus, there was enough food lying around that I could level again. That settled it.

  2000 EXP’s worth of Soul-Stuff was a substantial amount, and I was one hundred percent sure I could exert some influence on the result of the leveling.

  So I willed the growth to happen, gritting my metaphorical teeth, steering the unseen process to happen in a certain way.

  It worked.

  By the time Krissy took another step forward, my eight tentacles had grown from 5.5 metres to 6.5 metres. This I had expected, and I was happy with it. But the real reward for my mental effort was something else, and it was twofold: my tenties weren’t just longer now, they were also thicker. And the cherry on the spirit-cake? A ninth tentacle popping into existence, joining its eight, older twins.

  Oh, this was shaping up to be a good day. Although, judging by the the weak, orange light dripping through wooden grilles of the ceiling, the day was coming to an end soon. I had to make the most of it.

  But first, it looked like Krissy needed some help.

  ***

  I didn’t notice that the drumbeat had stopped, not until I saw the drummer barreling towards us, slaloming between the support beams, jumping over oars the slaves had pushed onto the walkway. The green menace seemed to have forsaken his drumsticks in favour of a warhammer so large I was sure neither human nor elf could even lift it, let alone run with it. Behind him trailed another of the whip-wielding, half-naked elves, roaring like a madman.

  Krissy fell into a defensive stance, holding her sword low, ready to dodge the attackers. She drew on my Mana, willing it to permeate her entire body.

  I had 38 out of 40 MP in my pool, using 5 MP per minute for Mana Armour, and Krissy using another 4 MP per minute for enhancing her legs. Luckily with nine tentacles Essence collection was even faster now, and I had no problem replenishing Mana for the moment.

  ‘I got this,’ Krissy hissed, maybe to me, maybe to herself.

  I was actually curious to see if she could handle two of the crazed fuckers. I kept four of my tenties free so I could intervene at any moment, and used three others to pick a few souls from among the nearby rowers. 3 times 40 EXP. The toothpaste variety. The three rowers collapsed, their immediate neighbours who were still alive screamed, and the ork and the elf arrived.

  The ork, running and gargling, swung his giant hammer. Krissy ducked down and slid to one side. That was the correct thing to do; that hammer-blow would have hurt her, or killed her, even with Mana-Armour on. The hammer’s arc was wide, the walkway was kind of narrow. Having missed its intended mark, the hammer smashed into a rower, who was trying to climb out of the pit. He turned into a reddish paste, along with the slave behind him. If not for the chained shackles on their legs, they would have splattered on the hull. That was 2 times 40 EXP for me, without having to work for it, so thank you Ork Drummer.

  The ork gnarled something as its momentum carried it past us, but his hammer got stuck on an oar. Ork Drummer ended up tumbling into the rowers’ pit about two metres behind us, squashing a few of the humans in there. Luckily my tenties easily reached the souls left behind. 3 times 40 EXP served on a silver platter, just for me.

  Whip-guy arrived. Krissy moved, not quite as elegantly as an elf, but almost as fast, thanks to Mana. Before the elf could bring either his whip or his dagger to do anything useful, Krissy crashed into him, using her entire weight with a Mana-fuelled leap. Mana-Armour flared blue for a second, and the elf was pushed to the floor with Krissy kneeling on his chest. She flipped her sword around, business end down. The elf screamed one last time, then the sword went straight through his throat, hitting the floorboard on the other side. 65 EXP.

  Krissy stood, panting, smears of blood on her mask, on her clothes. Ork Drummer was scrambling to its feet, climbing out the puddle of crushed slaves in the pit. He wasn’t the only problem; up on the quarterdeck people were running and shouting. Krissy looked up, but it was difficult to see anything through the grilles. I stuck a tentie through, just a little, and I didn’t like what I saw. The spiritualists were congregating near the hatch leading down to the rowers’ deck. All four of them. Not good.

  ‘The spiritualists will be here any moment,’ I announced.

  ‘What do we do?’ Krissy demanded.

  Ork Drummer finally climbed out of the pit, covered in slave-blood. It stood, it roared, it readied its warhammer, glaring at Krissy. And an idea popped up — the result of a joint effort of my own mind and of a grinning Tentacle Horror instinct.

  ‘I’m going to possess the green fucker.’