The next thing I knew I was panting heavily and covered in blood.

  I was standing atop what I assumed to be the big demon octopus's corpse, with several more corpses I don’t remember in much finer cultist robes splayed out around me. With growing horror I noticed my hands and arms were longer, the bones more prominent. Each knuckle on my hand had curved barbs coming out of them, and my fingers were thin and long. I caught sight of one of my tentacles in the corner of my vision and recoiled at it. It was shaped like razor wire.

  My mantle was hanging off my left shoulder by two straps. My clothes were shredded. Luckily there was enough of my underwear so I wasn’t completely naked, but the lack of clothing really hammered in how far my condition had spread. There was now less of my normal skin than the black. Where my neck had been free of the stuff, it was now surrounded and—I assumed—about to make its way up into my head.

  Which is where my third shock came from. I was able to examine my neck so closely because I had two, small tentacles coming out of my traps, each ending in a black eye.

  My breathing picked up as panic set in. What the fuck is happening? What am I? I gotta—

  Before I could let the panic get full hold of me, I noticed one of the cultists. I hadn’t noticed it at the time, but this guy was wearing a subtly different uniform than his… colleagues? The same difference I now noticed from my memories of the shootout at the mall.

  Did one of these fuckers erase my memories again?

  I reached up and gently took the amulet Albright had given me, holding it between two alien fingers. It was still working, but I saw that it was slightly charred and warped. I took a shuddering breath as I realized how dangerous losing your memories in the middle of a fight could be. I made a mental note to thank Albright for the amulet.

  I tried to get off the octopus, which is when all the pain I somehow hadn’t noticed came roaring back and I stumbled. I fell down the large body in a bouncing cascade that felt like the aftermath of a car crash. Using my two new tentacles, I got another look at my body, specifically, my back.

  Large swaths of black skin had been shredded all up and down my back. I was missing two tentacles, all that was left of them were two stubby nubs wiggling futilely. The destruction went all the way down to the backs of my thighs and my left calf.

  Not bothering trying to figure out that happened, I used my tentacles to lift myself off the ground as gently as I could. I still had four (six if you count the two new eyestalks), and after some initial stumbling that came from having to compensate for the two missing tentacles that still felt there (phantom tentacle syndrome?), I got moving after a bit.

  I was in a dark room with one exit, which looked like a storage room. It was big, about the size of a snow lodge, filled with shelves and boxes. Judging from the destruction, I guess I must have been on the run and gotten backed into a corner. Crossing to the doorway added more evidence to my theory, as I found a couple dozen demon and cultist corpses.

  I suddenly shook my head, realizing that I had almost fallen asleep on my feet (tentacles?). I was so exhausted. I needed food for my body’s improved recovery to do anything. Hell, with how much of my body's needs have been hidden, I could be dying right now without knowing.

  I started opening up boxes. After the fifth one, I abandoned normalcy and started to slash open the sides of them for expediency. Many boxes were full of the robes the cultists wore. Some others were packed with bedding, undies, and plain white T-shirts. One box was packed with cash. Hundreds of five-dollar bank straps. I think this was around forty or fifty grand. I was tempted to pocket a few, but realized I didn’t have any pockets left.

  Another bolt of panic shot through me when I remembered the blood stick. I couldn’t find it. I abandoned my search for food for a frenzied ten minutes until, panting and sweating and newly sore, found it under the main bulk of the big octopus demon. Thankfully it didn’t seem to be broken, but the connection was weird when I snatched it up. I could tell my brother was nearby, but the signal was… fuzzier, for lack of a better word.

  By that point I was so tired I could barely move, so I just found a spot with minimal blood on the ground, lay on my least hurt side, and stretched my tentacles to shred box after box. It took me breaking nearly everybody within 25 feet, covering the ground in shredded cardboard and various supplies to knee height until I struck gold with a box full of MREs. Thank you, random cultist, who thought to buy prepper food.

  They were all mostly crap(aside from the pizza MRE. But if Bagel Bites are any indicator of anything, is that it's hard to fuck up pizza.), but I ate with a fervor only the truly hungry can display. I was about a third of the way through the 3x2 box of freeze-dried food and various crackers (about half the MREs I broke open had some cracker variety or a “bread” that was basically a cracker with delusions of grandeur) when I ran into a real problem: I needed water.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Many of the MREs are meant to be re-hydrated, but when I started eating I finally was able to feel just how hungry I was and skipped the middle man and just ate the chalky brick/powder that was supposed to be food. I understood my problem when I began to choke: I had been incredibly active for many days, not eating enough, bleeding, and—apparently—also not drinking enough.

  I used my tentacles to bring myself to another section of boxes and began to slash them as I ate the items in the MREs with some liquid content—which was mostly ketchup, mustard, and jams.

  I had to drag myself deeper into the room twice more, as none of the boxes contained anything liquid. Not even fucking soap! A delirious thought kept rising up, about how the Mongols used to open up a vein on their horses to drink their blood so they could keep on the move with minimal food. Each time the thought came up I shoved it back down, trying to convince myself I was not desperate enough to try that tactic with the corpses around me.

  Finally, a box hissed and splashed when I slashed it. Soda! Warm, gross, off-brand soda. I really hope that old wives' tale about soda dehydrating you was horseshit because I was out of options. I began to guzzle soda, but after dislodging a bunch in my haste I found a case of LaCroix and began to pound them.

  I felt my blood begin to move more freely in my body after my third one (which was concerning—but what’s new, eh?), and as I began eating again, I felt the various open wounds on my body begin to itch as they scabbed over the next half hour. During that half hour, I also ate until I felt I was going to pop, then hanged in the air like a horrific marionette, suspended by my tentacles as any normal resting position felt like torture.

  “You still live.”

  The illusion was back. I was so exhausted its sudden appearance didn’t startle me. The illusion sounded less like a frustrated villain; more like a disappointed uncle. I didn’t bother responding.

  “You are not Elysium,” the illusion said, gesturing at my tentacles. “Why do you aid them?”

  “Yeah, I’ll tell you exactly why I came so you can have more ammo to manipulate me,” I said tiredly. “Got eat a dick.”

  “However you hid your nature until now, they will find out,” the illusion continued. “They will kill you. So, why are you helping them?”

  “Lemme turn that question back at you, bud,” I said instead of answering. “Why worship a guy who basically wants to turn everything into carbon and hydrogen atoms? If he gets what he wants, you won’t have a cult. You won’t have anything.”

  “You obviously don’t know what you’re talking about,” the illusion said with a huff. “The Distiller will—“

  I turned it out once it became clear I was in for a proselytizing session and began to subtly carve the anti-scrying ward into the floor behind me with one of my tentacles, watching my work with one of my new eyestalks. I had to work slowly because I was working from a weird position, but also had to deal with doubled vision from looking at something my normal eyes weren’t looking at. It was like those videos I’ve seen of people in VR helmets that get too close to their wall, and the helmet gave them a video of their real surroundings overlaid on the game they were playing. Only, you know, more intense. How was my brain processing this? Did I grow a new imaging center in my brain? Did I have new neural pathways to my shoulders for the visual information?

  Luckily, my disinterest in the illusions preaching only seemed to egg it on more, especially when I rolled my eyes. What I picked up through half-listening was the guy behind the illusion expected to be turned into something that didn’t need a body and would roam the cosmos as a purely spiritual entity. Also, if I understand the subtext, weird mind sex with his female cult members.

  Finishing the ward was hilarious. As soon as the last line was set, the man screamed as his illusion fragmented as if it was being attacked by a thousand pizza cutters.

  “Get fucked you piece of shit,” I muttered as the illusion abruptly ended.

  By my count, the magi-SWAT boys (and lady) and I had killed more than a hundred cultists and several demons. They had to be running low on manpower, right? I gripped the blood stick and focused on Conner’s location, spider-walking with my tentacles in his direction. I made a bindle of MREs and what was left of the LaCroix before I left, eating or drinking whenever I noticed I was no longer full to bursting. I still couldn’t rely on my body to tell me if I was hungry or not, but I could tell when I was full. I was using that instead of being hungry to make sure I was packed with food.

  God, my ass itched. The skin on my back and the back of my legs had been sheared off, but my left cheek and a little of my right had gotten the worst of it, probably because they stuck out more. I stretched an eyestalk (it was taking surprisingly little effort not to freak out about my new transformation, which was concerning) behind me to look over my wounds, which led to the ambivalent discovery that the scabs were flaking off parts of my body to reveal black, craggy scar tissue.

  Some experimental flexing found that the pain had gone down by quite a bit, and mobility was on the rise. I still spider-walked and continued to cram food and drink down my throat whenever I stopped feeling bloated, but I was both relieved and concerned at my rapid recovery. The alterations I had made to my body were supposed to take place over days… not hours.

  Over the next twenty minutes, I navigated various halls and rooms, finding some rooms mostly empty while others with clear signs of being lived in. Luckily, either anyone left was fleeing before I arrived or they were otherwise indisposed because I didn’t run into a single person or demon.

  Finally, I found a locked room. Examining the door, I noted that it was heavy, with two heavy handles that saw frequent use. Focusing on the stick, it said Conner was beyond the doors.

  I lowered myself to the ground, setting aside my bindle and stick. I set my stance and gripped the handles, my not quite fully healed back flaring with pain as I strained with all my enhanced strength against the doors. The metal groaned and budged a quarter inch. I slammed my tentacles into the wall and floor for extra leverage and renewed my efforts. The metal groaned some more before something gave and the doors burst open, knocking me painfully on my ass. A wave of stink, comprised of feces, urine, and unwashed bodies flooded out of the room.

  I had found the prisoners.