Book 3, Chapter 3

I shot forward just as they opened up. Both squads had two big men with belt-fed machine guns, filling the hallway with lead (or, more likely, copper jacketed steel). One fellow was prone on the ground and opened up with a fucking fifty cal.

Thirty-six tentacles sprang from me, twelve from my back and six from each limb. My clothes were so shredded I was basically wearing a loincloth. The tentacles shot forward, breaking four of the five machine guns and wrapping around their owners.

The fifth machine gun was being operated by Roy, who had been ready for me. As soon as he saw the tentacles, he drew the sword on his hip and brought it down with his considerable might on my extra limbs before I could react, neatly chopping through them, which sent several sharp spikes of pain through my head and core. I snarled through the pain and ramped up my future sight, feeling my temperature rise as the world unfolded before me.

I fell into Kristy’s squad, grabbing her right tank by the collar of his breastplate and hurling him with enough force to deform the metal at Roy, who was in the middle of increasing his weight. He noticed the human projectile with just enough time to drop his magic and collapse with the man instead of being a solid wall for him to crash into.

Seeing a future where a dozen tentacles were severed, I snapped them up and out of the way as Walt came through. His eyes widened in a comical show of surprise as my heel connected with his shin, snapping it neatly as he hit it at over ninety miles an hour and crashed into the back line. Defensive enchantments sprang to life around him, saving his and his companions lives as a balloon-like bubble of telekinetic force kept the collision from being lethal, but sending him and three others careening down the hall like knocked bowling pins.

The second front-liner of Kristy’s squad lunged for me, having produced a machete that looked more like an arming sword—no, it was an arming sword. I ducked and pivoted, his arms flying behind my back as I scooted past him, then slapped him away with five tentacles wrapped together into a single limb with enough force that I felt ribs break.

Kristy was bringing her small machine gun to bear on me and with two flicks of my wrist I severed the strap and knocked it away. Following the second motion I reached up and placed my hand on her cheek and quickly dove into her memories, then slightly deeper into the memories of her body. Yup, the Waker had made her body forget how to breath. It was trying to re-learn, but the body wasn’t really set up to learn how to breath twice. I quickly set up a patch job that should at least make her nights more comfortable, while also making it so the genetic memories would (hopefully—I’m learning as I go here) soon settle and become natural.

As I came out of her memories my hand trailed down to her chest and I shoved her at the wall, quickly shooting lashings from my fingers to adhere her there with a resin collar around her neck.

Just in time to duck a swing from Greg’s sledge hammer. I grabbed him with my magic and flung him up high on the wall, before covering him completely in lashings thick enough to hold an elephant still. Hopefully his regeneration doesn’t also make him super-strong.

I turned to find the final two people kneeling over Albright’s prone form. I briefly scanned my memory of the fight and recalled that Walt had clipped the poor guy when he flew past at highway speeds. Beats ignored me as she focused her hands over Albright’s forehead while the other guy… I couldn’t remember his name. He stayed behind and I only interacted with him maybe twice? He’d been the one to give mouth-to-mouth to Kristy when I was fighting the Waker. He was deeply tanned, looked amused and nervous in equal measure, and held his hands in the air.

“I’m good,” he said, a drop of sweat trickling down from his hairline.

I snorted and eased off on the future sight.

The entire fight had taken less than ten seconds.

“Sorry about this,” I said, then took off down the hall, quickly passing a groaning Walt and his three colleagues. I managed to get around the next turn in the hallway before the shaking in my limbs caused me to collapse into a loose pile, sliding across the polished floor for several feet.

I gasped and panted, rolling onto my back. I placed my hand over my heart, feeling it beat faster than I ever had before as I struggled to pull the tentacles back into myself and calm down. I struggled to quantify how I felt. I was tired, but I also felt… bloated. Like something inside of me was pushing against the lining of my being, and every time I flexed my abilities it got stronger.

Need to eat, Other me chimed in. Need to interact with other humans without fighting them. Need to laugh, hug, kiss, fuck, joke, compete, watch movies, play Skip-Bo, build a gingerbread house, fart and get laughed at—

Need to be human, I boiled down.

In essence, Other me confirmed.

Without further input, I picked up what he was putting down. I’d spent so long pretending not be human that it was started to become true. Once one accumulated enough power, what you wanted to be true tended to happen. Even without magic. Just look at despots with their propaganda divisions, or the billionaires of the US. When magic and other eldritch forces got involved, it compounded the issue. Magic was all about breaking the rules of reality and making what you wanted to be true, true. Magic made the saying “Fake it until you make it” much, much more literal.

Gotta get outta here first, I muttered mentally.

No shit, Other me said with an echoing laugh that I pretended wasn’t unsettling.

I dragged myself to my feet a few moments later, still trailing a score or more of tentacles that I was gradually reeling back into wherever they go when I’m not using them. I knew they weren’t going back inside me, because I didn’t gain or lose mass when summoning or dismissing them.

I found several more, much larger if not as powerful security forces over the next ten minutes. I relied less on future sight and more on overwhelming magical might and just slowly mashed them all to the floor with a giant telekinetic mattress. Once they were all mashed to the floor with just enough room to breath and nothing else, I disarmed them and pasted them to the walls with lashings. Using that much magic strained me, but in a different way than using my tentacles and future sight.

Then I cottoned on that I was much faster than most of the personnel in the facility, only seeing three speed specialists, including Walt. My solution then became to power through them at forty miles an hour, covering myself in a telekinetic wedge that acted as a makeshift cow-catcher and bullet shield. By the time they were picking themselves off the floor, I was already on my way.

I forced yet another giant door (gotta find out what the official name for these things are, I keep wanting to call them “bulkheads” but I know that’s not right) open, letting it slam down behind me as I finally found myself in something other than a hallway. It was a landing with a stairwell going up.

I started up the stairs in a run, forcing my senses up them in a flood. Several magical wards and other defenses lit up as I approached, but I crushed them with liberal applications of telekinesis despite the growing pain in my temples. I’ve probably used more magic in the last hour than I had in my whole life, but it was oddly easier to use raw magical might rather than the combination future sight/eldritch powers. Overusing magic just brought pain; pain and I were long acquainted.

… I think. With every thought I had, there was an undercurrent of “I think,” as by and large my whole personality and everything I knew was based on a series of stacking guesses facilitated by powers I reverse engineered from the being that nearly killed me, based on pure instinct and some help from Other Me.

I burst through a heavy set of security doors, the normal kind you’d see in an office building and not the Dr. Evil lair doors I’ve been dealing with so far. Just as I got the last of my tentacles absorbed back into my body (or wherever they go) and began to take in the room, my future sense warned me too late about a lightning bolt.

If it had acted like a normal lightning bolt, I would have been fine. I dodged while throwing up a screen of telekinetic force. Instead of shooting past me and grounding itself out on the wall or the floor, the lightning paused for an instant before redirecting itself around my hasty defense and arcing into my chest, hurling me across the room, through several things that may have been walls or desks before slamming into a wall that wasn’t made of drywall, but concrete.

I tried to spin up my future sight, but I was too disoriented. Luckily, the guy who ambushed me seemed to want to chat rather than finish the job.

“I should have killed you years ago.”

Clouds, angry and flashing with red and white light, materialized in the corners and crevasses of the room and gathered a few feet away from me, coalescing into the shame of a large man in medieval armor, holding an ax-headed polearm that was a good two feet taller than me.

I coughed a glob of black blood and phlegm onto the floor and dragged my forearm across my mouth. “Hey Jager,” I said with a rasp. “Nice to see you again.”