I had waited a little over an hour before I was confident that no one had noticed our entrance and started slowly moving to the actual building itself. The one of the many doors I ended up using proved to be remarkably easy to open. It wasn’t that it wasn’t both locked and magically alarmed, but the lock was easy to spell open and the alarm was just stupid. It was basically the energy construct version of tying a piece of string to a door and the other end to a bell. Sure, it worked, if you were dealing with people who either couldn’t see it or were incredibly incompetent.

Most of the time noticing it was spent trying to see if it was actually that simple. It was something a brain damaged Nephil three year old should have been embarrassed to make. And that was the weird part, it was demonic in origin. A demon had clearly made it, even if they weren’t a very skilled one. I was used to demons being pretty pathetic, but this was just sad. On the bright side, this did mean a demon had been here, even if this particular one wasn’t very high level. I wondered how complicated they had made the demonic hierarchy by now. It had been obscenely complex and pointless by the time I left the picture, and I was sure it had only gotten worse.

I slid my own spell into the alarm, molding into it in such a way that it was both indistinguishable from the original and completely useless. One tiny application of telekinesis later and the door swung open. I gestured at the open door as if to say ladies first, selectively ignoring the fact that that didn’t logically apply at the moment. She slipped past me and pulled the door closed behind us. I switched my divine sight on and scanned for life or magic.

Marian flinched in shock when she noticed whatever my eyes were doing. “Demon.” She said, despite knowing I wasn’t. I frowned at her.

“What do they look like?” I tried to examine my own eyes internally, but their physical form was hard to distinguish past the knot work my soul had formed in them.

“They’re like metal, like silver.” She sounded as if this of all things was bothering her quite a lot. I was lucky that lilin, like most daemons, are more mentally resistant to trauma than base humans, or I might have had a problem by now.

“So, my irises are metallic.” That would make sense, considering that was what demon eyes look like, but she shook her head.

“No, it’s the whole thing, like you have no whites.” I considered that. It was probably an effect of my body adapting, which would mean it was somehow more effective. “You have slit pupils.” She added.

I frowned at that. “Vertical or horizontal?” That description sounded very familiar, which made me think there might be another reason.

“Vertical, like a snake.” I nodded.

“Yeah, it’s probably a side effect of the tether.” I shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter.”

I continued down the hall, having concluded that it was safe enough. I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I didn’t think Marian had any idea either. I was definitely going to get somewhere. I figured I should spend the spare time preparing for disaster. I had reframed from preparing any spells before because I suspected I might need a lot of free power to work through the wards that had proven to be… rather lacking. Seeing as the only threat I expected from here was the directly confrontational kind, I figured it was probably worth using my reserves now.

I had increased in overall divine might a lot after eating Steph, but most of the power from that was going back into my body. I was still way below a level where I would have significant excess, even if I was a lot more physically formidable than I really should have been. That was because I was still riding around a physical meat body. Sure, I could do stuff like move it’s matter around, but it was still a corpse with a lot of very complicated spells letting me use it. That meant it wasted a lot of power.

What I really needed was a divine body of incorruptible flesh, but that was still a ways off. I would need a lot of pure divine might to form one in my current state, which meant I was probably going to be stuck like this for a while. That meant I wasn’t going to accumulate much loose power, which was the point of drinking all that blood. I now had a decent sized store of primordial light, which I was deliberately keeping out of my metabolism as a whole.

I didn’t have enough for much in the way of brute force spells, but I could certainly do something more subtle. I use chaos magic, an approach that only me and my progeny have ever learned, at least to my knowledge. Instead of directly building a fixed construct and setting it to do whatever it was made for, chaos magic works by building a crude form of the spell and giving it the ability to constantly make tiny random changes to itself. A secondary part would monitor those changes and track how they effected the construct’s function. It preserved the parts that made it work better for whatever criteria I set it to look for and set them as the new base it should work from.

The result was a spell that would endlessly evolve towards a more effective version of itself. That meant that chaos magic allowed for far more impressive result than the stagnant form my siblings used. They were restricted to only what they could completely plan out themselves, rather than letting the spell grow as a living thing. That meant theirs tended to be rather structured and ineffective. After all, the biggest sign of intelligent design is if the design isn’t very intelligent.

Chaos magic creates an indisputably better product, but there are certainly draw backs. One was time. Chaos magic started as either inefficient or non-functional. For most spells, it was a matter of milliseconds before it was up to the same quality as a normal spell with the same purpose. A few more, and it would be far outpacing its counterpart. That might not seem like much of a downside, but a few milliseconds could make all the difference when two god like beings clashed. If the enemy’s spell atomized your body before your ward was ready, you would definitely notice, assuming you survived.

Another problem was that it took more power. By its very nature, chaos magic would have to consume power to perfect itself. That meant that you either had to feed it a lot more power to make it grow in a reasonable time, or only slightly more and let it slowly improve itself. The combination of those to problems meant that you either had to be patient or have a lot of excess primordial light to work with. I didn’t have the second, so I figured I’d have to go with the first.

There was also the issue that I never had trouble with. The thing that most people where stopped by was structuring the conditions that managed the growth. None of my siblings and not all of my descendants could understand how to see the possibilities without constricting them, how to shape the future without dictating it. I always found it for more intuitive than the exact and unbending structures most people used, but to each is own.

I constructed a decent number of spells before my now magically augmented ears picked up approaching footsteps and what sounded like a pare of voices. I stopped Marian. “I can hear someone coming.”

She stopped, looking distinctly worried. “What do we do?” I lay a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t worry. I have a plan, just trust me here.” It seemed like that was a tall order in her mind, but she clearly didn’t have a better option. She nodded, and I rapped my arm around her head and in one smooth motion twisted it around about 200 degrees, bringing it to a position it wasn’t made for and shattering at least one vertebra.

She immediately collapsed into my arms, beginning the twitchy seizure thing lilin do when their spines are sufficiently compromised. I bridal carried her to the intersection with the hall the voices were coming from, likely presenting a rather bazar image. Marian was a fairly heavy-set woman, with a body type that hailed from one of the overgrown European ancestries. She wasn’t actually fat, mostly because lilin had neither the biological reason or capacity to accumulate excess. However, that didn’t stop her build from having significant mass.

Steph, on the other hand, was of partial asian dissent, although I was a little to out of date on the current humans to say how much or be more racially specific. She was nearly a head shorter than Marian, and probably half her weight. And I, having copied her to the best of my rather substantial ability, was exactly the same. The extra mass had vanished into the devouring void inside, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t mimic more if I needed to change back to a bigger form.

That meant that I was carrying someone twice my size, which would have been a lot harder if my physical strength had anything to do with muscles. As it was, I probably could have thrown a tank without much trouble. I could have easily just carried her with one hand, something that I did before tossing her into the air just high enough to lightly kick her in the back. She went flying, landing with a flop right in the intersection about ten feet ahead of me. Okay, so the kick was relatively light.

The owners of the voices, who turned out to be to shapeshifter men, saw her and ran up to check. “What the fuck?” The taller one asked, as he realized what they were looking at.

“Who is it?” The shorter asked, not surprisingly failing to answer his partner’s question. The taller one crouched down over Marian, trying to get a good look at her face.

“Go report this. I’ll…” He turned to his more hight challenged companion, but trailed off as he saw the body with its chest ripped open that was already dissolving into sludge.

He spun around, his body already growing in size and developing something that looked a lot like crocodile hide as he searched for the thing that could kill a shapeshifter so fast without making a sound. He made a full circle, finding only the twitching lilin and puddle of sludge. This was likely made all the more disturbing by the spell I could see on his earring which looked like it was for revealing magic that would hide someone’s presence. There are few things more terrifying to the human psyche than knowing that something could kill you are any moment and having no idea where or what it was.

He was already a hulking mass of naturally armored muscle by the time he noticed Marian’s face. While Marian had landed chest down, her neck was broken at such an angle that she was looking straight up. I could tell the moment he realized that she wasn’t just looking up, but was looking up at something. The moment it clicked, he looked up and screamed with a pitch that was surprising coming from something that big. I couldn’t say what part was distressing enough to warrant that reaction.

It might have been because I was clinging to the ceiling like a humanoid spider, or because my head was turned 180 degrees to face him. It might have also been my apparently inhuman eyes, or even the impossibly wide smile that bisected my face and revealed way too many teeth. I honestly couldn’t say, but it was definitely something, because he sounded terrified. Unfortunately for his chances of getting back-up, I had already dropped the sound trap spell I used on his friend around him.

I didn’t feel like giving him time to do anything productive, so I let myself fall from the sealing, forcibly twisting in mid air and snapped my foot out into a full force kick. It connected with the side of his neck, where the armor was soft enough to let his head still turn. Much like Steph had been, he seemed far denser than he appeared, and his current state probably didn’t help. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for me, I had just added another soul to my divine might and was quite a lot stronger than I had been a few minutes ago.

The top of my foot went through his neck and sent his head and body in opposite directions. I am a big believer in the stopping power of a good decapitation. The force involved sent my fall into a spin that became a rolling landing, which ended with me rolling back onto my feet a few meters away from his decapitated body. I made a quick visual sweep of the new effectively dominated battlefield, before strolling over to his head.

His body was still breathing, something hard to miss when it’s through a pulverized stump of a neck, but it wasn’t otherwise moving. His head was also clearly alive, since his face was far from still. I wasn’t sure if they would stay that way, or just survive a bit longer than a human’s would. It would be interesting to find out. I rolled his body over and started the process of extracting the heart. It wasn’t hard with my strength, but I really should try using a tool one of these days.

Before long, I had his heart carefully extracted. This time I didn’t just want to eat it. I wanted to see if a shapeshifter would live without their hearts, and head, apparently. I still wasn’t really sure what they were or where they came from. They seemed to be an alien species, one that wasn’t derived from any of us. That meant that, somehow, someone or something else had entered the picture. A person or thing that didn’t have to follow the rules I was used too.

I watched for a moment, waiting to see if anything was going to change, but he seemed to be stable. Having concluded my subject wasn’t in immediate danger of passing away, I put his heart into the wonderful belt pocket thing they give waitresses and checked on Marian. Yes, there had been a box of those in the restaurant’s basement, and how could I not take one. I mean, it’s a free pocket, which you can steal!

I rolled Marian over and twisted her neck back into alignment. Surprisingly, I had a lot of practice doing this. The twitching stopped a moment later and, with one full body spasm, she regained control of everything below the neck. I smiled down at her. “You good?” She didn’t answer for a moment.

“Why did you do that?” She finally asked, her voice soaked in suppressed fury.

“I wanted to test something, and that was the best way.” She stared at me.

“That hurt so much.” I tilted my head.

“Well, yes. I broke your neck.” I had thought it hurting was a given, but she seemed to feel the need to tell me.

She looked like she really wanted to literally rip my head off. “Do you have no regard for my safety at all?” I gave her an expression of utter confusion.

“Yes, I thought I made that perfectly obvious.” Honestly, I wouldn’t have brought her hear if I cared about her safety. Rather than explode at me, she seemed to deflate at my words. She flopped onto her back, staring at the sealing as if it held some secret to not being there.

I figured I should leave her to it and went back to the severed head. It was still there and still seemed to be alive. However, the stump had changed noticeably. While before it had been… well, a stump, now it had healed over and was slowly growing outwards. It looked like a bubble of flesh at the moment, but I suspected it would eventually grow into a new body. I had to wonder where the material was coming from.

It was certainly possible to conjure matter, although it was more like creating a spell that would pretend to be matter. I used that method all the time. Heck, that was how incorruptible flesh was formed. However, that sort of non-matter tended to be obviously fake under divine senses, including divine sight. But, this looked like it was real. That raised the question of how the hell shapeshifters acquired their mass.

It was technically possible to create real matter with magic, if you were very good. Unfortunately, there is a mind-numbing amount of energy in stable, solid matter. That meant that it took enough primordial light to vaporize a couple cities to make a fimble full of somewhat dense material. It was even worse in the reverse, since anyone who tried to turn matter into magic would find that it took so much power to do that you got basically no return. While that was a good way to get rid of stuff, it was certainly not a good source of power.

Considering all that, these shapeshifters were really a mystery. A mystery that I was going to solve sooner or later. For now, I would settle for interrogating this one. All I had to do was figure out how to interrogate a severed shapeshifter head. This wasn’t exactly my first time questioning a disembodied head, but usually either they have a in built way to talk without lungs or I had a lot more magic at my disposal.

I picked him up, watching as his eyes followed me. “I assume you can hear me fine? Blink once for yes and three times for no.” There was a moment before he blinked once. “Good. Now, will you grow a functional body on your own?” Another pause, followed by another deliberate blink. “Will it take less than an hour?” This time he wasted no time in blinking thrice. “Can you focus of growing just what you need to talk?” This time the pause lasted a little to long. “You know I can just crush your head between my hands.” I turned to Marian. “Would I crush him?” I asked.

She didn’t respond for a long moment, before finally sighing. “Yes, yes you would.” I nodded in satisfaction and turned his face back to mine.

“So, can you?” The response wasn’t immediate, but he finally blinked once. I smiled. “Good, will that take less than an hour.” Two blinks. I sighed, this was going to be a very… interesting interrogation.