I immediately started freaking out, grunting and straining my neck, trying to get a better look at my leg. I couldn’t feel them. They were supposed to move. I was telling them to move. My brain and mind was telling them to move but there was no response.

  Wol put a paw on my chest, his eyes wide. “Don’t move, Practitioner. Breathe.”

  Realizing only just then that I was hyperventilating, I stopped, staring into his golden orbs. The ancient feline held my gaze, staying completely still as only cats could do. It took real conscious effort to control my breathing.

  I only freaked out about five more times, going back and forth between frantic yelps and, breathing in and out at Wol’s count. It took awhile because by the time it was over, I was too exhausted to talk. My cheeks fell on cold asphalt, while my mind wandered to an imaginary safe place that didn’t exist. Wol and Hwari’s conversation faded to the background.

  “It’s not physical except the ankle. Hwari?”

  ‘The daemon devoured. Ate and ate and ate. Our Caller is weakened, but he’ll recover,” She replied.

  I could feel Wol pacing. He stopped somewhere near my feet, probably sniffing or studying something intently.

  “He feels weaker. Why?”

  ‘The daemon?’

  “Not like this,” Wol mummured softly, “Something is wrong with his practice. It’s changed. Warped. Something–” His voice broke off.

  I heard Hwari say something I’d never heard her say before.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  That was enough to get me to roll my head. I struggled to do even that. It was harder because I was cold, and I was starting to feel every wound, every hurt, every little cut that happened since yesterday. There were tiny burns on my arms, not the one that Maw had burned up, but my left arm from the warehouse yesterday and school earlier today. My back hurt something fierce. My neck was stiff and sent splitting headaches every time I turned them.

  It felt even worse than normal.

  When I finally managed to get Wol within view, he was staring at my gravity knife, one paw raised off the floor. He carefully set it down, circling it and hiding it from my vision.

  “W-what’s going on?” As I spoke, I realized how thirsty I was. I swallowed my spit, trying to ignore it but the thirst was a thing in my head now.

  “Jain, this knife… you said your mom gave it to you?”

  “Yes,” I swallowed. Still thirsty.

  “Did you use this item in the ritual to open your Third Eye?”

  “You m-mean in the ritual? Yeah, Emyrith said I needed it.”

  Wol spat a curse in Korean.

  Some analytical part of my mind was putting the pieces together. How tired I was, the different wounds, the reason why I was refusing to look at my arm –and that same part of my mind added the gravity knife to the list. I hadn’t even thought much about it. It was a knife. That was that. A knife with sentimental value, yes. A handy knife? Yes, but still just a knife. In the grand scheme of everything, it was more of an afterthought.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Multiple things,” Wol said, “Do you know what it means to be awakened with something? To go through the ritual with a specific item?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “It means many things. For one, when your practice is more potent with it then without it,” Wol said. “Having it on your person works. Holding it is better. Using it directly in your practice? Even more so.”

  I started thinking of all the crazy things I’d been doing in the name of my ‘practice’. Getting rid of the Yeounui, managing to contact the Cold Sickness, winning against the fae and mercenary woman in the race, those were times when I had the knife on me. When things were down to the wire, I had the knife on me without fail, every time, always.

  This time too, with the daemon.

  I tried to sit up on my elbows to get a look at the knife. But Wol was sitting in front of it.

  “Is it, was it a trick?” That’s where my first thought went: that Emyrith had set me up somehow.

  “No. Not a trick. It was a common ritual custom, but one that is seldom exercised. I stopped seeing it when people invented international travel,” Wol said. "It’s bound to you in a way that belongings are seldom bound to their owners. You’ll never lose this knife, you’ll always know where it is. It won’t break easily either. You’ll find that it’s sturdier, more flexible, and harder to chip than normal knives.”

  “What happens if it gets damaged?” I gave up on sitting up and let my head fall back down a little too fast.

  “Your practice will be affected. You are stronger with it, but without it, you will be weaker than you would have been if you had gone through the bestowing without it in the first place. You will always be a step behind other practitioners. Your staff, trinkets, instruments –those will feel wrong because they were supposed to be a set with your knife. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah,” I said and hissed as my body seized up in pain. It took me a couple of seconds to ask the question I’d been dreading the answer to, “Something’s wrong with it?”

  Wol stepped aside. I turned my head, still on the floor, and took a look.

  “Fuck,” I swore through gritted teeth.

  It had been changed. No, infected.

  The black metal casing had grown spiny prismatic thorns all over the handle which seemed to undulate in the moonlight. The metallic blade part had turned iridescent purple –or green, depending on which angle you looked at it from– reminding me of a beetle carapace or supercars running down the highway.

  There was an eye in the blade. Not on, in.

  An eye with slitted pupils surrounded by dozens of smaller pupils just like it. The ocular figure was wrapped by tentacles that ended in hands and fingers. It floated inside the blade, traversing it freely as if there was depth, which made me think of the space inside as a prism, or a different layer of reality altogether. It pressed up against the blade, locking eyes with me, and instantly awoke the madness from Euclid’s book that had been fading.

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  I looked away. When I looked back, the eye had grown bored, exploring its prison once more.

  It was trippy as hell.

  “What happened to it?”

  “I believe you managed to seal a footprint of the madness that was in the daemon,” Wol studied the blade carefully. “Fascinating.”

  “Yeah, I’m fucking glad someone’s entertained,” I snarled, but it had mostly been at the situation. Mostly. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It… I can not say,” Wol muttered, “I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

  That did not bode well.

  “But it might affect your practice, especially when holding the knife,” Wol gulped. “I believe in the last part of your chant, you bound the madness, but banished Maw. Perhaps in that moment, your abjuration talent was enough to do both, and separate the two entirely.”

  “The circle,” I said, “Euclidean elements but not demonology diagrams. That means the demon could slip through, but the eldritch would be bound.”

  “That explains it. You are growing,” He said with a small nod of approval.

  “This can’t be free,” I said. “Nothing is.”

  “It wasn’t. And it probably won’t be.”

  “Wol, but that doesn’t explain anything about my legs,” I growled out. I made a fist with my right hand and immediately regretted it. There were countless blisters all over the entire arm. I didn’t dare look. Not yet. Not now. Not when I just wanted to say ‘fuck it all’ and go home.

  “My legs, Wol,” Those three words had no bite in them at all, just helplessness. “What happened to them?”

  “Simply put, the daemon ate parts of your soul around your legs,” Wol said calmly.

  “Fuck.”

  “Practitioner, it will grow back,” Wol stressed each word, making sure it got through to me. “But it will take time. Hours. Days. Perhaps a few weeks. But it will grow back and it will be as if this never happened, understand?”

  Wol’s certainty breathed more calm into me, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. “Wol, the trial. If I can’t walk, how am I supposed to–”

  “It’s only one leg, Practitioner. You will be able to move,” Wol said before I could finish. “We will do this slowly. Now, try moving them.”

  I did.

  Wol was right. It was only one leg that wasn’t responding, the other seemed to listen to me fine.

  ‘Can you stand, Practitioner? Walk your path?’ Hwari asked.

  “I don’t think it’s about can or can’t. I think I have to,” I muttered and rolled over to the left side, careful not to let my right arm touch anything. It still pressed up against my ribs and I hissed as the whole arm began to sting. The sensation of bloody cloth and stickiness of the tape was too much on raw skin.

  Then I sat up and tried to stand using one leg. I lost balance and fell.

  I fell on my right arm.

  The scream was a given. The red-white tunnels closing in at the edges of my vision however, that was new. I clamped my teeth, taking painful gasps, screaming through my chest occasionally.

  “I-I,” I swallowed a breath.

  “I will go see if the child has returned,” Wol said.

  He was talking about Abigail. Would she help me? Or was she another Valstein who was going to screw me over when I least expected it?

  It’s not like I had a choice.

  “Go,” I said.

  Wol ran out, leaving Hwari and I alone.

  “Hwari, I need the flashlight,” I said and immediately regretted letting Wol go.

  ‘I cannot, Caller,’ Hwari responded.

  Right. She wasn’t a preternatural that had corporeal form. Wol had said something about constantly going to the in-between of the different layers. I wondered if those places had a name.

  I sucked in a breath and rolled over to the left, managing to sit myself up. It took a lot of effort and my arm bumped against my body again. I waited for the pain to arrive, but it never did. I chanced a look at the shoulder and regretted it immediately.

  Peeling blisters were drowning in clear pus. A few of them had torn open and were leaking out. My shoulder was ruined. Bad. Ugly.

  “That’s going to leave a scar,” I said, mostly to myself but just because I had an audience in Hwari. “What do you think, Hwari?”

  ‘It looks burnt, Caller,’ She said.

  Goddamit.

  I got my left arm under me and did the tightrope act of balancing on one hand and one leg. I managed to limp over to the wall and rest my arm on it. I kept my right arm suspended even if it was more difficult to balance in that position.

  “Hwari, the knife,” I said. I’d almost forgotten.

  ‘Caller, I cannot exercise intent on the material plane,’ She said.

  Was that annoyance I heard in her voice? Somehow that made me a little happy. That even while fried extra crispy, and deboned in one leg, I still had enough snappiness to make the usually calm ghost-osteichthyan annoyed.

  I carefully limped over halfway, decided against it, bent over and crawled over on one arm and on leg. I felt Hwari start floating above me.

  I started chuckling.

  ‘Caller?’

  I laughed harder.

  ‘Caller, are you alright?’

  “It’s just funny,” I said, unsure if it was delirium or hysteria –if there was a difference at all. “This scene reminds me of old stories where the animals travel together. And I feel like I’m one of them now, crawling like this with you and Wol by my side. We’re basically a circus show.”

  ‘I do not understand,’ She said gently.

  “Bremen town musicians? Homeward bound? The Fearless four?” I kept crawling.

  Hwari genuinely sounded concerned. ‘Caller, should I call Wol back?’

  “No,” I said, “But you can remind me to show you guys old movies once this is all over.”

  ‘If we survive, yes.’

  I wasn’t laughing anymore.

  Only once I got to the knife did I realize I had forgotten one small detail: the entire knife was covered in spines. The other option was to grab it by the blade instead of the handle. But the eldritch eyeball inside swam over, watching me with curiosity. Somehow, I got the feeling that touching the blade would be bad. Instead I reached out to try and hold it by the spine.

  The spines retracted at my touch.

  Frowning, I took my hand away and the sinuous spines extended again. When I repeated the motion, they folded back, lying in grain with the handle’s length. I then surrounded the handle, cupping it with my hand and waited to see if it was a trap. The spines stayed folded.

  I took the eldritch knife and slid the blade back into the handle. Then I shoved it in my rear pocket where it had resided ever since the mercenaries showed up at my school. Only then did I feel whole again.

  I felt my dead leg start to tingle at the toes.

  It didn’t end there. My cuts felt better. The arm hurt a little less, and suddenly all the small aches and nicks and scratches were the same way. It’s not that the pain wasn’t there anymore. But they felt further away, like it was someone else’s problem and I could handle it later. I felt whole again.

  The knife. It made me a little less human. Less mortal, and more preternatural.

  I managed to get to my feet and started limping towards the exit again.

  Wol walked in and someone was besides him. It wasn’t Abigail.

  “You can stop right there,” said the man.

  I stopped but couldn’t help myself to one jab. I wasn’t one to miss freebies. “Hey, is that a pistol in your hand or you just couldn’t wait to see me?”

  He was holding a gun aimed right at my head. I mean, could you blame me? He’d walked right into the warehouse with that one.

  by Jarex

  Emotions are fuel. Happiness is ammo.

  Sam just wants to be a good person. It’s why she chooses to use her ability to see the unseen world of werewolves and vampires for good. Mainly, she hugs ghosts to death. But when shapeshifting aliens kill her cat, all the hugs and pleasantries in the world won’t get her back. Becoming a magical girl will.

  Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. However, even equipped with magic, guns, and extra limbs, she is woefully unprepared when an entire alien invasion descends on her hometown…

  This story definitely contains:

  - Idealistic female lead

  - Focus on Litrpg mechanics

  - Point/stat/spell system

  - A mix of early cyberpunk, magical girl, and supernatural

  - Guns.

  - Spider facts. °°OooO°°

  - HUGS!

  - Lesbian romance subplot

  - Occasional dark moments