“Before we do anything, there’s something I need to show you,” Rita said, hoisting her spear.

After they’d finished eating and cleaning up, Samual had surprised her by stating that they were going to start her training immediately. Intense physical exertion immediately after a meal did not seem like a smart idea to Rita, who’d been planning on crashing into bed relatively soon, but Samual had been insistent.

His argument was that he needed to analyze her technique and current condition if he wanted to figure out a proper training regimen for her and she’d reluctantly agreed after forcing him to promise that he wasn’t going to run her till she puked.

She’d seen enough military movies to know how bootcamp worked.

“Can I use one of the training dummies?” Rita asked, pointing towards the pile in the corner.

Samual grunted and moved to to set one up for her. “You can use one of the training spears on the back wall,” he said as he wrestled the pole of the crude, wooden mannequin into one of the pre-prepared holes in the floor.

“No, I want to show you something about my spear,” Rita insisted.

She’d never actually showed anyone else what her spear could do. Not because she’d been trying to keep it a secret, really, the opportunity just hadn’t come up. But if Samual was going to try to help her figure out how she could fight, well, then it made sense that he was aware of everything she could do.

And maybe he could help her figure out what exactly it was that she could do.

“Fine. Now what did you want to show me?” he asked, impatiently taking a seat on one of the benches.

Rita skittered forward on her eight legs and firmly pressed the tip of her spear to the dummy’s chest. She felt the spring-like blades at the front bend to absorb the force.

“This,” she replied, twisting the spear in her hands.

Immediately, the blade contraption at the front coiled in on itself as the spear rotated, the front tip pushing outwards as the whole thing coalesced into a single, elongated point.

Rita had never realized this before, but as the blades coiled together, they lengthened, making the spear just a bit longer. According to physics, that should result in the spear being pushed backwards. Newton’s third law.

But it didn’t. Instead, her spear seemed to drill into the wooden training dummy as it lengthened, puncturing it with a crack of wood, while she felt nothing but a gentle backward push.

She looked over at Samual to see him staring at the wooden dummy with narrowed eyes.

“What did you just do?” he asked slowly, standing up and stepping over to inspect it.

“I just twisted. When I twist it back, it returns…”

“No, keep it like this,” he instructed when she tried to demonstrate. “Can you pull it out without losing the shape?”

Rita nodded and pulled. It took a few tugs to loosen it, but eventually the spear popped free, allowing Samual to inspect the point.

It was also the first time Rita had taken a proper look at it. The blades coiled tightly around each other to form an extremely tapered point that seemed almost too long and too thin to be structurally sound.

“Now stab it again,” Samual instructed, patting another, unbroken part of the dummy.

Rita complied, thrusting the spear forward again with force, just like Samual had taught her way back in the Nightmare. To her surprise, the tip simply bent under the force of the impact, sliding off the dummy’s wooden chest.

She held up the spear in front of her, staring in horror at her now deformed weapon. The entire metal spearpoint had been deformed, squashed and bent at a forty-five degree angle.

“I broke it!” she exclaimed in shock. “I broke my spear!”

“Try reverting it,” Samual suggested.

To Rita’s great relief, twisting the spear back the other way made the blades uncoil into their original, bendy configuration with no apparent ill effects. And twisting it back again made the elongated tip reform, straight as it was before.

“Interesting,” Samual remarked. “It appears that while your spear can change its form, its not designed for stabbing in either form. It only pierces during the transition.”

“What does that mean?” Rita asked, confused. She was trying to follow, she really was. But medieval weapons were not her strong suit.

“It means that this is not a spear, it’s a needle,” Samual replied. “The only way to use that weapon is to press the tip against something and twist,” he explained, feeling carefully at the edges of the hole. “But it looks to have really incredible penetration. Clearly magical in nature. You might be able to pierce even thick armour.”

Rita could see something move behind the dummy and belatedly realized that there was a small hole right through it. Her first thrust had pierced all the way through, even though she’d not even been applying any real pressure.

“This is good,” Samual said, nodding. “It makes things easier. Hey, what’s this?” he asked, rubbing his fingers together before sniffing them.

“What’s what?” Rita responded, skittering closer to take a look. She couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“Some kind of clear fluid. Viscous. Faint, fruity scent. It was in the hole in the dummy.”

Rita shrugged. “No idea. You sure it wasn’t there before? Some kind of sap from the tree the dummy was made from?”

“No. These dummies are twenty years old, this wood is bone-dry. I think this came from your spear.”

“My spear?”

Rita shifted her grip, bringing the tip up to her face. Hmm, there did seem to be some kind of wetness on the tip…

“Could be some kind of poison,” Samual remarked, sniffing at it again.

The spear clattered to the ground as Rita jerked her hands away from it. “Poison??” she spat, glaring at him. “Why didn’t you warn me!”

Samual just met her glare and shrugged.

“It makes sense. It’s not sticky, like your webs and if we go with your spider theme, that’s the part that you’re missing. Besides, what other fluid would be useful for a weapon to secrete?” he speculated.

“However, if some kind of poison or venom does naturally seep from your weapon, I believe that would bring it on par with some of the weaker magical weapons, depending how debilitating it is. We should ask Gora when we see her again. I don’t think this kind of power is normal for soul weapons.”

Rita picked up her spear, far more gingerly than before. A weapon that coated itself in poison sounded ridiculously dangerous to her. Even something like a spear where the poisony bit was kept as far as possible from her own body sounded like a terrible hazard, and not just for the people she was trying to stab. It was long and unwieldy, what if she nicked one of her legs by accident? What if she accidentally stabbed someone who was on her side?

“How… how poisonous is it?” Rita asked carefully, holding it as far from the tip as she could.

Samual snorted. “How am I supposed to know that? Go stab someone outside and we’ll see.”

Rita glared at him, but Samual just met her gaze evenly.

Right, he probably hadn’t been making a joke in bad taste. He was likely being dead serious.

“Maybe some other time,” she said, smiling awkwardly back at him. “But how do I even use this thing without poisoning myself?”

“You seem to have been using it fine thus far. This is definitely going to make training trickier, though,” Samual admitted, looking at the weapon in Rita’s hands thoughtfully. “You need practice with that thing, but sparring with it is far too dangerous.”

“Couldn’t I just practice with a wooden spear?” Rita asked, still holding the weapon like it might bite her.

“Yes. But your whole technique is going to be different,” Samual replied. “And more importantly, we need to get you comfortable with using that weapon of yours, poison or no.”

Rita closed the door to her new bedroom behind her and rested her head against the solid wood.

Despite saying that he wasn’t going to push her as hard, Samual had nevertheless kept her practicing for what felt like hours, twisting and untwisting the spear over and over, switching form both mid-thrust and after thrusting, either in the air or against that same training dummy, until her arms burned.

Interestingly, they’d found much less fluid in the second hole that she'd made in the dummy, leading Samual to conclude that the ‘poison’, as they were assuming it was, took some time to replenish itself. It was likely she was only going to have one or two truly deadly stabs before she would be down to ‘just’ punching holes in things.

After catching a little bit of the stuff in a small, glass vial that he’d dug up from somewhere, he’d called it for the day, promising that he would find an alchemist or something to analyze the stuff for her in his usual curt and cold manner.

A hot soak was exactly what she had needed after the training session with Samual. Unfortunately, all she could get was an icy cold shower-slash-sponge bath.

While the place had a ‘shower’ of sorts, it was basically just a tap set high up in the wall. It had a small cubicle with a drainage pipe in the bottom, and was fed from some kind of tank or container on the upper level. It had been, unfortunately, not sized to accomodate her rather sizable posterior and only worked with icy-cold mountain runoff. That was the standard around these parts, apparently. If ordinary people wanted hot water, they boiled it in a cauldron over the fire in the kitchen and filled a bath, which was a hell of a lot of effort and took ages.

Rita took a deep breath as she ran her fingers through her wet hair, shivering just a little. She sorely missed the hot bath that she’d had in Triskellion.

When she turned to face her room, it was just in time to spot a cockroach scuttling across the ragged carpet that had been buried under a pile of wooden dummies and practice weapons until Samual had helped her carry out all of the old garbage in the room before dinner.

She was pretty sure before that the room had been neglected for years. And while they’d carried out all the big, icky stuff, it unfortunately still contained the indigenous fauna that were inevitably drawn to such neglect. She’d given the place a brief sweeping to get rid of the worst of the cobwebs, but it was going to take a lot more than that before it wasn’t going to be infested.

For a moment, Rita reflected on how different she was now to the person that had woken up in the sopping wet remains of her own bed. There was a time when the sight of a spider or a cockroach would have elicited a scream from her. She really did not like bugs. Never had.

But now? After what she’d seen? A normal-sized bug just didn’t hold as much terror when you’d faced ones the size of dogs. It just irritated her that she didn’t have proper shoes with which to step on the damn things. Or feet, for that matter. Not that she was going to step on a cockroach with bare feet right after taking a shower.

For a moment, the poison in her spear sounded mighty useful. Now if only she could figure out a way to make some roach-bait with it.

Luckily, she had other plans to protect her bed from further predation of nightly vermin and, apart from her little backpack that she was still dragging around from the Nightmare, there was nothing else in the room she particularly cared about. The various fabrics and furniture that had been there before could charitably be described as ‘moth-eaten’, or less charitably as ‘tatters’.

Turning around, Rita carefully pulled a thread of sticky silk from the rear of her abdomen with her hind legs, before winding it around each of the legs of her bed. That would hopefully prevent anything from crawling on her during the night.

She also attached a few threads of web to the ceiling in out of the way areas where she wouldn’t bump them with her head as she walked around, letting them hang down in loose, sticky strands that would hopefully snare any flying insects such as moths or mosquitoes.

She thought back to her previous life and how useful that would have been back in her apartment. Somehow, there was always a mosquito or two in her room at night during the summer, keeping her awake with its incessant, high-pitched buzzing. Imagine if she could spin her own webs to catch the damn things?

Tomorrow, she was going to have to spend some time weaving herself some new webbing for a chest band. Her current one had been feeling a little bit worn, having soaked in quite a bit of sweat. When she’d tried to rinse it in the shower, it had mostly disintegrated in her hands.

For a moment she’d had the terrifying mental image of her underwear melting the moment she got splashed by a bit of water, but a bit of testing had revealed that she was fine; fresh webs were mostly unaffected by water. It had been either the age or the sweat and oils it had absorbed from being pressed against her skin for so long that had made it so fragile, most likely a combination of both.

Either way, it meant she was going to be using what amounted to disposable underwear for the foreseeable future. At least it was disposable underwear she was making herself.

Then again, she was probably going to have to go clothes shopping tomorrow anyway. She’d rinsed out her shirt - the one that Justine had lent her, though she had no idea how she was going to give it back now - but it needed to dry before she could wear it again. Instead, she’d borrowed a shirt from Samual to sleep in.

And yet, she was strangely unenthusiastic about the idea of going out. Honestly, Grailmane scared her a bit. It had an Academy that essentially trained only fantasy villain stereotypes, not one but six Mordor-esque towers, each filled with their own Magelord or Dark Lord or whatever, and, according to Gora, a literal portal to hell.

It was the most quintessentially ‘evil’ city you could imagine. If there was ever a place the hero would go to face his final nemesis to save the world, this was it.

Yet the people that she’d seen on the way here hadn’t looked particularly evil. Nor did they look particularly downtrodden and oppressed. They’d looked like… well… people. A little dirtier and a bit poorer than back home perhaps, but that could easily be explained simply by the general level of technology, such as how shitty their showers were. They’d looked and acted kinda normal. Like people going about their daily lives, just trying to survive and live to the best of their abilities. Even the non-human species.

Grailmane was, according to Samual, one of the most independent and multicultural cities in all of Aer. The others were generally either a ‘Human’ city or a ‘Dwarven’ city or an ‘Awlin’ city or whatever, and the status of members of other races ranged from second class citizens through automatic slavery to ‘kill on sight.' Grailmane, at least, might still have indentured servitude, but it had abolished slavery centuries ago. Anyone was welcome.

Apart from goblins, though that seemed more a matter of practicality. The buggers tended to eat travellers if left alone.

It didn’t matter what you were in Grailmane. Everyone was screwed equally. Unless you were a Magelord, of course. But she supposed that it was a universal truth that there had to be someone at the top doing the screwing.

Her webs spun, Rita stepped back to admire her handiwork. Perfect. Well, not perfect, exactly. It looked like all the old cobwebs she’d spent so much effort dusting out earlier were back, except the spiders had taken anabolic steroids and half-a-kilo of cocaine each in the meantime.

Well, it wasn’t like she was expecting guests anyway.

Her stomach gurgled. Rita scowled down at herself. It wasn’t that long since she’d eaten, she surely couldn’t be hungry again.

She sighed. No, it wasn’t hunger. At least, it wasn’t conventional hunger. It was the other kind, the one she only felt when she saw essence. It had been slowly sneaking up on her for the past few days, but she’d done her level best to ignore it, hoping it would go away.

It hadn’t. It had only gotten worse, as hunger tended to do. Especially during the last day and all the excitement they encountered on the way to Grailmane.

What exactly had she done during that trip that could have made her hungrier? She’d been running and climbing, sure, but that was hardly new. Ordinary physical exertion hadn’t had a significant effect on it in the past. She’d certainly spent enough time running back in the Nightmare.

What she had done that was a bit different, however, was tap into some kind of supernatural strength to pull Gora up a sheer cliff.

Was that the connection? Was that why she couldn’t figure out how to do it again? Because she’d ‘emptied her tank’, so to speak?

Rita frowned as she started making her bed with the clean linen Samual had dropped off for her while she was in the shower.

Alice had already figured out that she could drink the essence stuff. Probably. Even though Ava had said it was a really, really bad idea for most people. And the last time she’d used… magic had been right after she’d bitten the dead Masked. She’d been able to use the her tronic naturally at first, right after she discovered it, but it went dead shortly thereafter and despite the other magic experts’ assurances that she would quickly recover the tiny amounts of essence the tronic used to operate, she never did. At least, not until after she went into the Tree… and bit it.

Rita nearly dropped the linens.

Fuck. It was all so obvious. She had to eat her magic!

She was some kind of ‘essence vampire’ thing. Normal people recovered their internal essence naturally, somehow filtering it out of the sunlight or something, but it seemed possible that she could not. That was what her weird, extend-able teeth were for, for biting people and sucking out their magic!

No, wait, perhaps not people. According to what Ava had told her, humans and most other mundane sapient species actually carried relatively little magic inside them, at least compared to Nightmare monsters and other magical creatures. That was why most mages had to make use of external essence sources like the little vials that were such big business. Biting a human would probably be like biting beef jerky. No juices.

Back in the Nightmare, she’d sucked the essence out of the dead masked, used it to fuel her weird locating spell-thingy, and then ran out of essence to power her tronic because she’d left the damn thing running! Then, after she’d bitten the Tree, she’d sucked out a whole bucketload of essence! Enough to power her tronic for days and still leaving her enough left over to power-lift Gora.

That was what Alice had suspected, Rita realized, back in the Tree. That was why she drank the last bit of essence. It hadn’t been suicidal whimsy, she’d noticed the pattern! And Rita’d wasted almost a full vial of the stuff pouring it out over her translation tronic instead of just drinking it like she’d wanted to at the time!

She definitely still ate normal food, though, that much she knew for sure. Dinner had been far too good to not be nourishing for her, and she had pretty much all the normal biological functions that went with a functioning digestive system. The only question was, did her body just crave essence or did it need it to survive? Was she going to starve to death if she didn’t shell out whatever it cost for a vial of essence every few days or weeks? It had sounded pretty pricey.

Wait, didn’t she still have a bit of essence left?

Rita skittered over to her little backpack and zipped it open.

She’d thought she and Alice had used up the last of it, but they’d done so inside the Tree. If everything that happened inside got undone afterwards, if it really was some kind of virtual world or whatever, then that would mean that the vial of blue essence that Ava had given her would still have the little bit left that it had had when she’d gone in.

It was weird. Rita hadn’t actually had a reason to check her backpack since they’d left the Tree. She’d barely put anything in it and no reason to. Everyone else had had better, magical bags that reduced the weight of stuff, so it hadn’t made sense for her to carry anything at full weight.

The first thing she found digging through her backpack was her empty water bottle. Her empty plastic water bottle.

Huh. She vaguely recalled plastic having some pretty cool properties, such as almost never decaying. Or terrible properties, if you were trying to dispose of it. Did this place even have plastic? Was it perhaps… valuable?

Wait, she’d just found it in the Nightmare. Anyone who wanted one could go find similar, and probably had. Maybe. Anyway, it wasn’t what she was looking for.

She stuck her hand back inside and rooted around, but there was no sign of the vial. Instead, she pulled out something else.

Something flat, rectangular and green.

Digging under her arm-wrap, she extracted her translation tronic, holding it up next to the circuit board she’d just pulled out of her backpack.

They were identical.

What the fuck??