Chương 70: Lucky Number Seven

The darkness was pervasive and as terrible as only a nightmare could be. I couldn't feel where I was, couldn't see even an inch ahead. I was standing at first, then after hitting my knee on the edge of something hard and sharp, I was crawling. The echoing laughter of the Pactmaker-worm-thing had long since left. The realm of darkness was absolutely silent. I could've crawled for an age, or for two minutes. It was impossible to tell. I need to kill that damn worm. I need to kill it. Time turned into a suggestion.

Slowly, hunger started to set in. The fear of starvation joined the fear of being in the dark, of being crushed by the hard skin of the ur-mimic, of being alone until the very end. I'm not going to allow it. I'm not dying, wriggling in the dirt like some worm. Suddenly, there was a speck of light ahead. I crawled towards it, the darkness making way and egging me on until I was glued to it with every one of my eyes. It was a window. And through that window was a memory of time long past. At the schoolyard of St.

John's Junior Highschool, behind a line of pricklyberry bushes, Rebecca and I were kissing. It wasn't the first time we'd tried it. The first attempt had started with chaste pecks on cheeks, nose, and forehead.

"Let's try it like in the movies," she'd said and that was the last thing I remembered. Then all I could see were her closed eyes, a mess of brown hair, a mole beneath her eye…

"What do we have here?" My heart stood still as a pair of vicious eyes peered over the berry bush. Elise stood there with her lackey, and there was no one I'd wanted to have seen less than her right now. I blushed furiously as we tore apart.

"Ewww," Tanya said, always grinning like she was in on the world's best inside joke.

"Look at them. Like a pair of slugs."

"Slugs can be cute," Rebecca countered, but her voice betrayed her uncertainty.

"No they can't." Elise rolled her eyes as Tanya made a barfing sound. They had their phones out.

"You can do better, Becca. Here, see, this is what you two look like." She turned her phone and instinctively, my hand went to my chest. I didn't have a great body. Too tall too soon, too skinny, a face like a spooked bird bludgeoned with acne. Stupid puberty. I was blushing furiously on that picture too. Then Elise clicked play. It was a video.

"Slugs can be cute — can be cute — can be cute," repeated Rebecca's voice.

"Here, I made a remix," Tanya giggled with barely restrained glee. There was the video again, except this time it had a basic trap beat and a slew of horribly distorted filters.

"Slugs can be — can be Ewww, can be Ewww, can be-be-be slugs, slugs, slugs." The duo broke out in riotous laughter.

"Beautiful. They should call me Picasso." Suddenly, Becca was standing up, right in her face.

"Are you two going to stop?"

"You know how to make us. Don't dump us for a date with the creep again, alright?" For a moment, I thought she was going to hit them. But she didn't. Quietly, she followed them into the schoolyard leaving me alone, sitting in the dirt, and with tears still crawling down my cheeks. I tore my gaze away from the window into my past. At the time I had still been in a period of obliviousness concerning people beyond myself and their oh so complicated feelings. Becca cracked my mind open.

All I'd wanted was to indulge in that sense of being accepted for another day, another hour, another minute.

"Nobody likes me," came a voice that sounded like my own, but distorted and distant. The scene blurred, and yet I found myself tumbling into the next. This time, the scene was a hospital. I was six or five, sitting in the waiting room, playing games on Mom's phone. She was sick. I didn't understand how sick at the time. All I knew was that she suddenly collapsed and rear-ended a very angry business woman in our car, and now she was here. A kid didn't know how to worry all day.

It was exhausting, and required a lot of practice. Instead, I drowned out the voices saying Mom was never going to get better by playing puzzle games. But the battery was on five percent. I knew how much five percent was. It was not a lot. I needed the charger, but the charger was in Mom's bag. The doctor-man said I should wait here and not disturb Mom, but Dad arrived half an hour ago and he was still in the room where Mom was. Maybe it was a grownup rule, the kind that only counted for them and not for kids.

I frowned. Three percent now. The phone was cheating. Four came after five, not three. I got up. On tip-toes trailing the sound of a guilty kid, I shoved the heavy hospital door open, shuffled over to dad, and tugged at his pants. He noticed on the second tug.

"Yes sweetie?"

"Phone." Back then, I was a legendary communicator. My single-syllable sentences were as broad in meaning as the sky.

'Phone' was a word, but 'Phone' could mean anything.

"Not right now," Dad said.

"But—""Sammy, please, go read a book. Mommy needs to sleep, and I have to go to work again soon. Please be good?"

'Good' was a word that could mean anything too. At the moment, it meant I was left without the charger. And without a distraction, looking at Mom dozing away in the hospital bed, my mind was filled with unimaginable terrors.

"Even Mom and Dad think I'm annoying," came the voice again. Pamphlets. Fliers. I was older now, twenty and so sure about my place in life. My place was as a failure, but even a failure could do a small amount of good, if they didn't get in the way. Even if that good consisted of handing out bundles of pamphlets for a theatre group that was more interested in making dumb jokes and partying than rehearsals or anything approaching ambition.

"Come join the theatre group's reimagining of Hamlet, please?" The look people gave me was withering. I shouldn't have added that 'please' at the end. It jumped over 'sycophantic' and cannonballed right into 'pathetic' territory. A confident senior grabbed one of my pamphlets, a bouncy girl with curly hair and a smile like the world already belonged to her, and she just had to choose which parts. Exactly my type. To be fair, I had many types.

Maybe some primal part of my lesbian monkey brain thought that if I just spread my net far enough, one of the girls would ensure that my lineage continued.

"Hamlet, huh?" She asked with a grin.

"What's new about that?" I squeaked, and after squeaking, tried to stammer out words.

"I-it's a re-imagining. There's so much S-s-shakespeare takes elements from o-other interesting stories of the time — the feigned insanity, t-the hero-as-fool trope. T-the story is timeless, a c-classic even today! And we-we… we have decided to turn it into a comedy."

"Comedy? How's a story about royalty killing each other comedic?"

"W-well, instead o-of feigning insanity, Hamlet is just batshit insane from page one. He starts the play by pouring poison into his uncle's ear…" Her eyebrows rose, signaling doubt.

"I-it's really… really funny." I thought so during rehearsals at least. But the girl didn't believe me. Her grin turned pained, the bounce in her step sinking back to earth.

"I bet." Her voice was flat and unimpressed. I only noticed later that day in the shower that I'd missed my shot.

"No matter how good I get at acting, one day I'll fail and people will see past it, see the ugly real me. Boring. Stuttering. Insecure." This scene faded too, leaving me curled up in darkness. Maybe I should stay like this. Maybe that way nobody would ever have to cringe at me again. Magical Girl Arachnid? What was I thinking, I don't even like spiders… I paused. Wait a dang second. I do like spiders. Except they were bristly and creepy and venomous— Which are all good traits to have, thank you very much.

—unless you belonged to the subgroup of people with a healthy developed fear of creepy, venomous crawlers. A large, majority subgroup. Imagine the difficulty of trying to sell the image of a man-sized whip-tail scorpion — also known as whip spiders, but not whip scorpions, which are a completely different creature for some odd reason — or a member of the Pholcidae family to people, to kids, to— Spider Man's a thing. He's quite popular. But… No buts. Spider good. End of discussion.

Those weren't really my thoughts, were they? They were yours, mister Vermis Mentiphobus. Or should I say, mister Mind-fear-worm? That's right. I know a lick of latin. Your butt is dirt, buster, I've got your number. You're just trying to twist my memories until I'm too depressed to lift a finger. Which didn't make it any less scary. A worm, a mind-worm was the seventh test. The final hurdle was overcoming your own insecurities. Poignant.

After all, how could any self-respecting huntress dance through the streets with a severed head in one hand without feeling at least a little bit self-conscious? It was a downright terrifying proposition, fighting something that you couldn't grasp, that was literally inside your mind. It didn't even trigger the system's firewall, that's how insidious this thing was.

Just imagine, a parasite you cannot see nor hear nor feel, subtly influencing your actions and thoughts until the line between you and it blurs so completely that— No, nope, none of that. I know exactly how flatworms influence snail behavior and parasitic mushrooms slowly take over an ant's nervous system. It's all quite mundane biology. Which, again, didn't help much since it was happening to me. Me! My poor body was infected by a foreign something. What hope was there, what reason to go on?

Well, for one, I want to beat this dang trial, get the reward, then hope it helps Pom-Pom and Parsnip. For two, I'm going to see Addy again. And when I do, I am going to kiss, hug, and screw her brains out. For a moment, I felt the mindworm stutter. Would she really condone such a violent show of affection? Let me check. Hmmm. Yes, yes she would. B-but that isn't what affection is supposed to be. Affection is… when two individuals… do a thing where they hold hands and…

clearly, she doesn't love me, and never has, and never will. Snort. Grow up, worm. You don't know her half as well as I do. You don't even know me. Slowly, I stood up. The cloying, claustrophobic, terrible darkness — was still there, yes, but it was just darkness. There was nothing in it that I didn't know, nothing I couldn't defeat. A worm, really. If I lost to a worm, Addy would force me to undergo training until she'd beaten me into putty. Was beating me up a show of affection? In a sense.

She would never beat me up. Clearly, that is proof that she has no affection left for me. Nice try. The problem remained that I was still in the trial, the worm was in my head, and beyond actively countering its prodding of my subconscious fears every step of the way, I had no way to deal with it. The trial didn't just end because I became aware that I was being manipulated. I had to take that last step and break free myself. Like a bug trapped in a web, huh? Love what you're reading?

Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. A web nobody could escape from, least of all me. The worm was great. The worm was great! Slowly, ignoring the worm, I groped my way through the room. Here was a chair, there was a desk, a microscope, a stack of paper. Slowly, the details combined into a mental map. Addy's high-intensity mental training was to thank for both speed and fidelity. She only made me go through that because she thought I was stupid. Which was not true.

She just saw room for improvement. Focusing on the mind was efficient. Stupid stupid stupid. Wow. I think I broke the worm. I was still stuck in the long lab-hallway, fairly certain that I could navigate my way back to the entrance, but unsure if that counted as a success. If not, the only choice I'd have would be to go back to the sixth trial and eat one of the rare mind-focused essences there, no matter what it would do to my build.

Not for the first time, I wished that I could swap between builds smoothly like Pom-Pom or Parsnip did, picking up and discarding power sets like a jacket. … really? No response to that, mindworm? Mayhaps the worm was sulking. Annoying as it was to admit, the worm had a point though. I wasn't making it through this trial, with or without its hindrance. The essence of a magical girl was neverending gumption, positivity, dramatic flair, and magic.

I was lacking on the magic front, as always, and drama wasn't at the forefront of my mind. But I was in a room full of vats. And in those vats were magical creatures aplenty. I touched a vat, and my system gave me an answer. [The Legendary Ghorax - Rare - Tier 2] Another rare. A higher tier one, meaning it came with more additions and modifications. But still, just a rare. Most of the room was much the same. Rares, rares, rares.

I did find a single exceptional quality essence, but it was a pure body essence, six points (!) in scaling, but not a single spell. Great in theory, but in practice I needed something else. I reached the end of the room. There was not a single vat I hadn't inspected from here to there. So I began touching the walls, looking for doorknobs, buttons, hidden levers. The search dragged on for an hour. Then, one of the panels in the wall sunk in barely an inch. There was the smell of muggy air.

What I thought to be a small hidden room turned out to be a stairway, one further leading down. Which meant there was an entire level to this dream-trial I hadn't explored yet. Still dark. Still unnerving. Hopefully this isn't some secret eighth trial. At the bottom of the stairs was an airlock, one which opened and closed with fitful cranks. The moment the internal door slid to the side, a body fell into my hands. [Ixl Mixl - Rare - Tier 2] It was barely insectoid.

Only some of its parts were covered in hard chitin - legs, forearms, a round plate on its forehead. The rest was leathery skin, with internal bones and the empty eye sockets of a mummy. Blankets, beds, dining tables, cups, torn fabric, posters… the world expanded under the press of my fingers, revealing a habitation unit. Stumbling over the skeletal, mummified remains of the odd person, I eventually came to a place much like the one above.

This lab wasn't filled with entire bodies, the vats only containing the barest cores of a creature: embryos, eggs, zygotes. Another stairway led further down yet. There was much the same to this place as to the one above, except here the lab's wall too was breached, with dirt having poured in to fill half the room. The essences are rare towards the exit, but are replaced by exceptional ones towards the blockage. I wonder if I can dig through and…

The moment I approached the earth, some instinctual part of me told my body to throw itself to the side. [One Moment] triggered. The way [Trigger] worked was fascinating. Through [Trigger], I could prepare any of my other active spells, effectively charging one of [Trigger]'s six charges with another spell at twice its charge cost. Then I could choose an activation phrase, thought, or sensory cue that would act as the trigger to automatically cast the spell stored in that [Trigger] charge.

Complicated, I know, but this was how it worked in practice. Four charges of [Trigger] were loaded with [One Moment] under the same condition: If I was about to be hit by an attack, dangerous projectile, etc., the spell activated, meaning that as long as I could perceive the danger, I would automatically speed up my perception of time for roughly two seconds. This guaranteed that if there was a path out of harm's way, I would have ample time to take it.

Time slowed and I ducked, hearing vats shatter all around me, showering me in glass and amniotic fluid. Something was still alive down here. Something huge. It was a secret trial, one you couldn't enter without already being afflicted with the mind-fear-worm. I was going to die a most horrible death. Ignoble, forgotten, leaving behind only unfinished business in the way only a failure could. Shut up.

I felt the vibrations along the wall and floor, first one, then two, then many heavy legs scrabbling for purchase as the creature dug itself out of the mountain of dirt. I had one magical staff turned spear, two slings, two daggers, and not much else. And I was still completely blind. Thank you mindworm, very cool. There was a chitter and a hiss. The air pressure on my face shifted. One moment triggered again.

This time I jumped, leaping in case this mystery predator was the pattern-seeking sort, the type that learned from previous mistakes. It was, judging by the whooshing sound that whipped past my feet. I did a backflip, just like Pom-Pom taught me, landing on both feet. Then I cast [More Spider Eyes], but they were as blind as the rest. Just judging by the air displacement, this thing was as large as a couple elephants, approaching kaiju size. What exactly was kaiju size? Pretty hecking big, that's for sure.

Too big to whittle down. Too big to keep dodging forever. Maybe I could find a weak spot… if I wasn't blind. For a brief moment, I hallucinated the mindworm cackling, curling in on itself with devious laughter. I jumped at a wall, channeling [Sticky] to run upwards after a third strike, only to trip over a pole that definitely hadn't been there before. Tripping meant falling to the ground. Since I was on the wall, I had quite a fall ahead of me.

I landed on all fours, only to be brushed aside by another overly long limb catching me square in the upper left leg. This time, [Trigger] triggered [Illusory Double], splicing a perfectly me-shaped copy off at the moment of impact, like a lizard shedding its tail. My body double was writhing on the ground in pain while I used my springy tendons to propel myself back onto, then up the wall, scurrying along. — only to meet yet another weird pole. What the heck was up with this stupid architecture?

Except, the pole just moved. I grabbed onto it, only for it to fling me across the entire room like a whip. One moment triggered as I hit the wall, and as I hit it with five outstretched arms another body double peeled off of me. [Trigger charges: (1/6)] Chitinous exoskeleton, horizontal attack pattern, whip-like antennae… Could it be? A whip-tail scorpion? I bounced, sending a few sling-rocks careening down at the giant arthropod, the sound of their cracks revealing the general shape of the thing.

Its body was flat, its legs long and thin. With two front grabby-limbs lined with spikes, it would have looked like a fearsome opponent. Yes, it was a whiptail scorpion. It had no dangerous tail, and it couldn't bend its body back too much to pose a threat while I was climbing on the ceiling. The room was too small for it to follow, leaving me ample time to marinate in my own thoughts. Many creatures down here followed surprisingly earth-like body plans on the outside.

No true arachnid could ever grow this large, but then again, humans generally didn't have six arms, and here I was. Assuming it was following the exact same body plan as a normal whiptail scorpion, that meant I knew where its head was, and its brain. I let myself fall, hitting its back with a satisfied thump. The creature shivered under me, twitching this way and that. You're a really cool arachnid. Sorry about this. I pulled out my Lucky 7, aimed it at the back of its head, and channeled joy. The gun barked.

Oh, how I missed that satisfying sound. The click of a trigger, the strike of its hammer, the magically distorted crackle of air as a yellow laser shot straight into the giant arachnid's head, oh how lovely! The armor was scored, but not broken. So I fired again. Because joy-ammo on the Lucky 7 had one fun property: as long as I kept hitting a perfect 100% joy charge, the joy ammo simply didn't run out. One shot. Two shots. Three shots. Click. Shit. Four in a row is good though.

The whiptail scorpion, which had been thrashing about in anger, then in panic, twitched softly under my feet. I got a kill notification, and some soulcoins, which was funny given that this was a dream and those soulcoins didn't mean a thing. But hey, at least the dream was accurate. Does this thing seriously not have an essence? Maybe a bit too accurate. Not that an essence I'd dreamt up would do me much good. What sort of spells would a giant whiptail scorpion essence even give? Meh.

I didn't drink the black goo for the trial's reward. I'm doing this for Pom-Pom & Parsnip. Except, I need the power, else I can't return to my friends above, nor keep the friendship with the ones I have down here because they'll get ground up in the mill of politics. Power and friendship, inextricably linked. Who'd'a thunk? I had an inkling that the trial was not over. The mindworm was still there after all. And while I had an idea as to how to kill it, I really, really didn't want to go through with it.

There was after all only one shot left in my Lucky 7. After that, it was all boomerangs, knives, and slings. They were more effective than they should have been thanks to stats and training, but they were only primitive weapons. I never stopped Addy's stat training program, even while stuck down here. Of course, I didn't have the various mundane training halls of The Academy at my disposal, nor a lot of extra ammo to run tests with.

During a session in The Academy, we had been trying to figure out what exactly my new rainbow revolver actually did.

"Each of the bullets needs a separate emotion for priming," Addy had said.

"Yeah. I've been buying the seven-shot rainbow quickloaders for now. If I knew what each shot did and when to use it, I might be inclined to buy the mono or dual color magazines."

"Good thing we're almost done then, eh?" Addy said, counting on her finger.

"Anticipation is a charged shot with high damage potential, anger explodes, disgust corrodes armor, sadness pierces shields, surprise shoots a high velocity bullet, joy can theoretically shoot an infinite number of times."

"And so we're left with trust." I aimed at the wooden log we were using as target practice. It had an ugly face drawn onto it. I didn't exactly name it Elise. That would have been in quite bad taste.

"Count your days, 'Lizbeth the Vile, for this is your last. Trust shot… Hiyaa!" The shot phased straight through the log. Addy and I looked up from behind a protective shield of bullet-proof glass. There wasn't even a bullet hole.

"That bullet did nothing. Have we perhaps discovered the legendary… friendly fire?" I mused. Addy frowned, walked up to 'Lizbeth the Vile, and inspected it front to back.

"Trust is such a weird emotion for a violent spell," she said after some time.

"Usually those are just buffs. Or restrictions."

"Maybe it is restricting the bullet to not hitting something?" I'd already bought an extra set of seven bullets for testing purposes. We were going to need them for testing.

"Try again. Maybe visualize what you're trying to do. Some magical items can be real finicky." And so I did. I imagined the bullet boring a hole straight through the target's nose. On the next shot, the bullet left a perfectly bullet-shaped hole… but only in the nose. There wasn't even any sign of spalling, shrapnel, or wooden splinters. The hole in the target's nose looked like it had been drilled and carefully sanded, not shot.

"Weird," Addy and I muttered. We continued making variations to the test, finally landing on the one that revealed its secret. There were two logs with painted-on faces stacked behind each other. Addy suggested I try hitting the rear one without harming the front one. After two tries, I got the image right, trusting entirely that the front 'Lizbeth was in fact undeserving of my bullet while the one in the back was heinous and evil beyond measure. The front log was unharmed, and the rear one had a hole inside of it.

"The bullet gets stopped by the magical bullet trap in the back, but not the concrete walls," Addy said.

"The bullet trap is only slightly enchanted with durability. Seems to me that the bullet is really weak to magical barriers. No shooting past shields with this one."

"But against anything else, I can basically launch a surgical strike straight past cover." Assuming I could visualize it correctly, and hit.

"Do you think I could shoot something immaterial with this? Like a ghost?"

"That seems to be what it's made for," Addy said, already looking up the manufacturer." reconfigure and redefine, to ward and watch against forces malign, huh? Checks out." Back in the present, I was looking at my Lucky 7 with a nervous anticipation. I had no clue what the mind-fear-worm looked like in real life, but that didn't mean I was out of options. This lab was made for creating creatures, one of which was the mindworm. A mimic was, in a sense, still a living thing.

Was it too far a stretch to claim that it might therefore have some sense of self-preservation? There was a twinge.

A spike of fear. With it, my confidence swelled. Kids. Whatever you do, do not try this at home. So. Mindworm. I know you're still there, you slimy, wormy thing. I can picture you quite clearly, nestled around my amygdala like some anthropomorphized Wormtongue. The worm shifted nervously. You can read my thoughts, so you know how this thing here works. Here's what's going to happen: I spun the cylinder, stopped it with a snap, and aimed the barrel at my head.

I am going to count to three, and if you're not gone by then, I'll make sure you and only you disappear forever. Don't worry, if you leave I won't shoot you, that's a promise. One. Two. Three. The gun clicked. Lucky you. Wanna try your luck again? One, two, three. Click. Five more to go. Something in my mind twisted. The darkness shrunk back. Out of my head there popped a worm as long as a forearm, floating in the air as if it was weightless. Weightless and insubstantive. See through.

Of course, the mindworm was a mimic ghost.

"You said I'm a pathetic excuse for a magical girl, but last I checked magical girls always win the day. And we're not beyond forgiveness either." I grinned at it.

"Say. Would you like a hug?" +++ Spiders eat worms for breakfast. That much was factually correct. My lips were chapped and dry when I woke from the trial trance. A door had opened in the wall of the room, right around where I'd discovered the secret door. The other rewards in the room, remains of legendary bug warriors that looked uncannily similar to the shapes inside the vats, were already scattered with exceptional rewards. But this secret room…

I had the feeling that if I hadn't gone down and defeated the whip-tail scorpion, then beaten the mimic at its own game, it would never have opened. There were three stone statues sitting in the room. Bones jutted out of solid rock. They were fossils and they looked so infinitely different from the creatures outside. They had gems on their foreheads, eye-like protrusions that seemed to follow me with every step. The air was filled with echoes of raspy whispers and click-clacks of a language I could never learn.

But I understood the general intent.

"Go on," they said, "pick one. It is your reward." Someone else must have gotten here as well at some point, as the forehead gem of the middle fossil was missing. A choice between left and right for me then. The one on the left had long, powerful legs, serrated at the back like saws. Its bones were reflective like steel, immovable, and gleaming in the thin light. [Essence of They-Who-Hops-Past-Stars] Tier 1 Rarity: Unique Growth: +4 Body, +1 Sense, +1 Mind Abilities: Choice of (2) of (7) Abilities Unique.

More exceptional than exceptional. The stats alone were insane. My heart raced fast and faster. This person was a humanoid grasshopper of sorts. The Body alone would make me so powerful I wouldn't need to rely on firearms; every single sling bullet would be like a small grenade. This would pair wonderfully with my mobile style, and depending on the types of abilities, there were some synergies to be discovered there as well. But that left me wondering about the right essence.

It was a person who was cloaked in billowing, hewn stone. Her face was barely visible, revealing at least three eyes that hinted at more. Her hands were hooked and clawed, hidden knives barely visible as impressions behind the stone. [Essence of The Great Deceiver] Tier 1 Rarity: Unique Growth: +1 Body, +1 Sense, +3 Mind, +1 Soul Abilities: Choice of (1) of (3) Abilities + 1 Transformation ability Well, that sure as heck sounded ominous. This skewed towards softer powers, with a focus on Mind.

More Mind meant more body doubles, or better body doubles if I chose to upgrade them further. The biggest hurdle wasn't in casting the body doubles, but having the mental capacity to control them simultaneously. More body doubles meant less being shot at, and more time to actually acquire and take care of targets myself. More Mind also meant more charges of [Echo]. Then again, I had more spells that scaled off of Body. Then again again, this essence promised a hecking transformation ability. That was…

what I was missing right? After all, what was a magical girl without a transformation? And that's what I am, no? I beat my foes with the power of friendship. I have a quirky friend group. I'm worried someone will find out my real level, my real identity. Maybe I didn't realize it because I was stuck in my own head for so long, but all the evidence points towards one conclusion: I have always been a magical girl. The world just doesn't know it yet.