“You sent Eldric?”

Magelord Krii was enjoying a nice tea in his study before bedtime. Or at least, he had been enjoying a nice tea until Henry reported in with the status of his newest hobby project.

“Indeed, Magelord,” Henry replied calmly.

“But… why? Krii asked, exasperated. “You know how he gets…”

“He needs the experience, Magelord. You keep babying him.”

“This is a delicate task, Henry. Couldn’t we have sent someone a little more suited to this particular challenge?”

Lord Henry shook his head. “If we never push him out of his comfort zone, how will he ever learn and improve himself, Magelord?”

“We don’t need to improve him! Eldric already does what he needs to, perfectly!”

“And how is that fair to him?” Henry tutted.

The Magelord sighed and drank the rest of his tea, before gently placing his cup back in its saucer with a soft clink and dabbing at his lips with his handkerchief. Then he stared flatly up at his senior apprentice for a few seconds.

“You made sure he understood the social nature of the mission?”

“I made him repeat it back to me, Sir,” Henry replied with a faint smile. “Twice.”

The Magelord threw his hands up in the air. “Fine. You win. We send Eldric. But if I miss my chance to add the lovely spider to my collection because he botched a simple task like this, I will be very cross, understood?”

“Do not worry, Magelord. I am keeping a close eye on him,” Henry replied. “If he seems unable to accomplish the task, I will step in myself.”

“See that you do,” Krii responded, gathering up his cup and saucer for washing up. Sure, he had apprentices who could do that, but then he would have had to put up with them running about on his personal floor in the tower and having a few chores done for him was not worth that kind of annoyance.

He would rather just do his own washing up and save the hassle of dealing with people.

“Magelord, I also do have some other, rather more important news,” his First Apprentice reported as made his way over to the small kitchen.

“Oh? More important than my collection?” Magelord Krii grinned, a note of humour in his voice.

“Very droll, Magelord,” Henry replied dryly. “But I am afraid this is rather bad news. The Academy has sent word that they reject your bounty claims for the Mitlan Inquisitor. Apparently they require proof of death.”

Magelord Krii stopped, then took a deep breath.

“Proof of death?” he asked with deceptive calm. “Have they inspected the barn-sized scorch mark on the side of the far hill?”

“They did, Magelord, but they say that merely proves that you fired the Lightlance. Before they will pay out the bounty, they want some kind of proof that the Inquisitor was actually struck and died.”

Magelord Krii rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I struck him with a million thaums of magic. Do they honestly expect there to be anything left?”

Henry shrugged. “I do not know, Magelord. But they were quite firm on the matter.”

Krii sighed and shook his head as he rinsed out his cup. Losing the bounty would be an expensive loss, sure, but not an insurmountable one. It would mean a bit of belt-tightening, perhaps halting a few projects until his stocks of essence were recovered. Unfortunate.

“We’ll appeal, of course,” Krii spoke. “Not that I expect it to go anywhere.”

Not like there was any kind of oversight over at the Academy. An appeal was basically a waste of time, amounting to asking the same people who’d made the decision whether they wouldn’t perhaps reconsider. But there were no other avenues he could really explore.

Sure, he could raise a stink with the other Archmagisters and, sure, it might undermine trust in the Academy’s bounties, but at the end of the day would anyone really care? No. Nobody could force the Academy to pay out if they didn’t want to.

Besides, truth be told, he would have blasted the Inquisitor for free.

“There is one other thing, Magelord,” Henry interrupted his thoughts. “I wasn’t going to mention it since I know how you feel about cooperation with the other factions, but with this nonsense with the bounty, perhaps you might consider it after all?”

“Hmm?” Krii asked idly, his mind mostly elsewhere.

“A contact at the Academy has brought a certain opportunity to my attention…”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm?”

“Something's weird.” Ixxy shifted her grip on Rita’s hand, pressing her thumbs into Rita’s palm.

“What’s weird?” Rita asked, now a little worried.

They were still sitting at the dining room table, with the two spectators — the cambion and the hunk — watching on from the sidelines. Rita’s arm was stretched across the table and Ixxy was pawing her hand, trying to get a clear connection to her soul.

It wasn’t working.

“I can’t properly see to your soul from here. It’s… fuzzy,” she said, scowling.

“Fuzzy? My soul’s fuzzy?” Rita asked, now sounding quite nervous.

“No, no, I’m sure your soul’s fine,” Ixxy reassured her. “I think it’s just the connection. I can’t get a clear impression.”

Sadly, they hadn’t signed anything yet, so Rita’s soul still enjoyed the full protection of the Grand Contract. That wasn’t what was the issue here, however. The connection still worked. If she’d been allowed to, she could still have taken pieces. It would just have been like trying to do surgery while looking through an out of focus spyglass.

“This isn’t working,” Ixxy sighed. “I’m going to have to get closer to the source.”

“What?” Rita asked with concern, watching Ixxy warily as she got up moved around the table and settled in the seat next to Rita.

“Don’t worry, my hands aren’t cold,” Ixxy grinned, shifting her chair closer.

“What do you mean…”

Then she stuck her hand under Rita’s shirt.

“EXCUSE ME!?” Rita yelled, leaping away from Ixxy and clamping her arms across her chest. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”

“Getting closer to the source, as I just said,” Ixxy replied innocently, her hand still held up in front of her.

“Bullshit,” the cambion growled. Both the spectators had reached for their weapons.

“Yes, Stinky?” Ixxy replied. “Something to add to the conversation?”

“Mom warned me about this. She’s just trying to cop a feel, Rita.”

Ixxy sighed. Normally? Yes. She’d be absolutely right. Payment could be collected anywhere where you could feel a pulse.

But she wasn’t trying to collect payment, she was trying to diagnose a medical condition with basically zero training. She needed the better visibility that only closer proximity provided or there was fuck-all she could tell Rita about what was wrong with her soul.

“Look,” she replied, glaring at the cambion in exasperation. “I have less than ten minutes left before my summoning wears out and I lose the contract. Do you really think I’d be stupid enough to risk that just to get a handful of titflesh? No offence, Rita, your boobs are pretty nice, but they’re not that nice.”

To illustrate the point, she cupped one of her own breasts.

“So… to figure out what is wrong with my soul you have to fondle my breast?” Rita asked skeptically while the cambion growled in the background, her big, ugly sword halfway drawn.

Ixxy rolled her eyes. “No, to figure out what is wrong with your soul, I need to feel your heart. Which is, unfortunately, behind your breasts.” She sighed. “Look, we can sit here, staring angrily at each other until my time runs out and all this ends up being for nothing, or you can put on your big-girl pan… er… socks and deal with being touched a little intimately by a medical professional for five minutes. Your call.”

Rita glanced over at the cambion, but Gora just shrugged helplessly.

Yeah, damn straight you don’t know shit, Dum-dum.

She blew out a breath. “Okay, fine. But no doing anything creepy,” she said, taking a seat within reach of Ixxy again and resolutely holding her arms by her side.

“Not until I know what’s wrong with you, promise,” Ixxy replied with a wink and unceremoniously shoved her hand back under Rita’s shirt.

Rita sat quietly, her cheeks turning bright red as Ixxy’s hand slid up along her stomach in a manner that was just a little too sensual to be professional. Until…

“Hey, what’s this?” Ixxy asked, rubbing the soft, stretchy material she’d discovered between her fingers.

“My bra,” Rita replied coolly, her cheeks now quite scarlet in embarrassment. “Please be careful with it. It took a while to make.”

“You made it? Is this spider-silk?” Ixxy gushed. “That is so cool! And it feels so unbelievably comfy!”

“Umm…”

“Right, sorry. Time is ticking.”

With that, Ixxy slipped a hand under a very uncomfortable Rita’s spider-silk chest band and rested her palm right on Rita’s heart.

Ah! That was better! Now she could get…

Webs. Spider webs. Giant spider webs. Everywhere.

Ixxy was sitting on a single thread of web thick enough that if she had attempted to wrap her arms around it, her hands wouldn’t have been able to touch on the other side.

And it was far from the only one.

Silken thread, from thick sheets of webbing to long, thin, barely visible strands were woven all around her, stretching in every direction, somehow attached to nothing but more silken thread in the distance.

She was in a world made entirely of spider silk. Just a gigantic spiderweb, stretching in every direction.

Huh. The souls she’d touched before hadn’t had nearly this much… depth to them.

Normal mortal souls were, if one had to translate metaphysical concepts to physical reality, almost crystalline in nature. Delicate, fragile structures that formed infinitely repeating fractal patterns spiraling deeper and deeper into their depths. Infinitely complex and perfectly uniform.

And for precisely that reason, quite boring. Too boring to even bother examining too closely, usually. When you’d seen one part of it, you’d seen it all. Everything was just fractal repetition, ad infinitum.

This soul? Rita’s soul? It was very different. No two parts of it looked the same. Every strand was unique. It almost seemed cobbled together in comparison to what Ixxy had seen before. Almost… constructed.

Fascinating.

Plus the whole… manifesting a portion of herself inside. What was up with that?

Unfortunately, she didn’t have time to stand and gawk like a tourist. She was on a strict time limit before her summoning ran out and she got yanked back to Triorbus Square. And if she was still inside when that happened… well, actually, that probably wouldn’t be dangerous as such, but the experience might be very unpleasant. So rather not do that.

And that meant she needed to find something that could have caused the very obvious mental issues that the idiot girl was complaining about.

Ixxy made her manifestation get up and look around.

The bulk of her self was still outside, occupying her physical body, which itself was exactly where she’d left it, pressing its palm against Rita’s chest. She could still feel and control it, if needed, and she felt it would take little more than a thought to pull herself back.

Unfortunately, the sheer weirdness of this soul made it quite a bit harder to figure out if anything was out of place. In a normal soul, any irregularity would stand out like a sore thumb, immediately visible as a break in the pattern. Here? There was no pattern. How was she supposed to know whether one strand was the correct thickness or another knot had the correct number of connections?

Picking a direction at random along the strand of thick webbing, she began walking.

When she came to a place where the strand passed closely over a flat sheet of silk, she she jumped down and followed that, figuring it was an easier path to walk and as likely to take her to the right place as any other.

All she needed was something that looked a little weirder than most. Something she could reasonably justify to herself as being the cause of Rita’s issues.

Would they fall for it if she made up some complete bullshit? No, probably not. That would be a bit too easy, and Timothy was hardly likely to leave that large a gap in the contract he wrote. There were numerous possibilities that he could include that would force her to either tell the truth or prevent her from making any changes that would not lead to Rita’s recovery.

Of course, she couldn’t know what would actually help Rita, so there was a bit of wiggle there, but just saying whatever and hoping for the best wasn’t going to fly. As long as she found something, however, that was good enough.

It was eerily quiet as Ixxy made her way along the sheet of silk. The air was completely still; the only movements were the slight vibrations in the webs beneath her feet from her footsteps.

Wait, no, that wasn’t right. Something was off. The vibrations didn’t quite line up with her steps.

Ixxy stopped, kneeling down on the thick sheet of silk and pressing her hands to the silk that she was walking on.

She was right. She wasn’t the one making the threads vibrate, or at least not the only one. Even when she was still like this, there was still a faint tremor running through them. And it was coming from ahead of her, where the strands thickened and a big, thick knot of them came together in one of the large clumps.

It was some kind of gigantic nexus, several times Ixxy’s height, with threads running off in every direction from it. It was far from the only one in this strange, silky landscape. Ixxy could see several more of those knots above and to the side. But now that she was paying closer attention, this one did seem a little different to the others. More angular and irregular looking, somehow.

Like there was perhaps a something buried beneath all the silk?

Moving from thread to thread, Ixxy made her way closer. Traversing this strange, messed up spiderweb of a soul was tricky, but not impossible. The threads often crossed and kinked around one another and as long as she didn’t fall down between the gaps into the gaping darkness below, it was just a matter of persistence and a bit of jumping and climbing.

Once at the edge of the ‘Clump’, as she’d dubbed it mentally, Ixxy formed her hands into hooked claws, and began crawling up. It, too, was vibrating faintly. Almost like it was… breathing.

From up close, the irregularities of the Clump became painfully obvious. Jagged edges, barely hidden behind threads of silk, odd shapes underneath the webbing, tangled snarls in the flow of the thread, severed strands just hanging off the side, something had clearly gone wrong here.

Expert or not, if there was something wrong inside Rita’s soul, Ixxy was willing to bet that this was where the damage was located.

Was it the only damage? Was each of these clumps like this?

Eh, who knew? It didn’t really matter, it wasn’t her problem. Rita had asked her to fix a problem, and by golly, fix it she would!

Unfortunately, Ixxy had no idea how to do that. She could cut away some of the extraneous pieces, perhaps dig out whatever was underneath, but there was nothing she could do about the severed strands or tangled snarls. The best she could do was cut out everything that didn’t look right and hope the soul itself would heal the damage in time.

Ixxy leaned in and inspected an odd, thickly wrapped protrusion from the mass. There was no reason why webs would bulge outwards in such a particular way, unless there was something underneath, pushing them out.

She would have loved to give it an experimental cut, just to see what was underneath and what exactly she was dealing with, but sadly she was not allowed. This was Rita’s soul, and there were strict rules in place against messing with a soul. Just considering the action already had the ominous walls in her mind glowing and threatening to clamp down.

Instead, she gave the weird bulge a harmless poke with one elongated claw.

A sudden, massive tremor ran through the webs under Ixxy’s feet, as if the entire place had been plucked by the world’s most gigantic guitarist.

The world shook and the webs themselves began to writhe and twist as giant bones rose seemingly from nowhere among the webs near the tumor, assembling themselves into a gigantic, skeletal, humanoid head and torso.

Even as Ixxy watched, the webs slithered and flowed to wrap themselves over its bleached, boney ribs and skull in a flimsy and grotesque approximation of flesh.

Empty eye sockets glared down at Ixxy, who was frantically holding on to the webbing by her feet to stop from being tossed off the tumor and into the darkness below.

Then its jaw hinged open, wider than should have been biologically possible, and it screeched.

It started with a tickle.

Ixxy placed her hand on Rita’s chest — nestled awkwardly between her breasts, though the demon had kept her word and hadn’t touched more than necessary — and closed her eyes. For a few moments it felt like nothing happened.

Then she felt it. A faint ticklish sensation, not unlike being touched gently with a feather on her skin. It wasn’t her skin that was feeling it, however.

She was feeling it… inside. Not inside her body, however. Not in her mind, either, not exactly. But also not… not in her mind?

It was as if something was moving around inside of her… somehow. Moving gently, carefully, yes, but moving nonetheless.

It was strange and uncomfortable. It was as if her brain was getting input from nerves it didn’t know it had. It wasn’t from inside her body, and it wasn’t exactly from inside her mind, though something close to it, which left… Her soul?

Wait. Alice?

It was but a moment’s work for Rita to drop back into her Mindspace. The moment her eyes opened in the sort-of featureless white space where she’d left Alice, she spotted the source of the tickling sensation.

There, right on top of Alice’s still-mutilated body, stood the ugliest cockroach that Rita had ever seen.

Even by cockroach standards it was gross. It was large and black, with four long, twitching antennae arrayed in front of it and disgusting, little hairs scattered over its elongated, chitinous-yet-oddly-fleshy body. It stood on six… no eight… no, twelve spikey, jagged legs with hooked tips.

It also seemed to have tiny little human eyes spread across the top of where Rita assumed its head was. And it was inside her soul.

Yeah… no. Fuck that.

Rita screamed. At first in terror at the sight of the horrible, disgusting bug-creature-thing inside her, but as saw it shudder and squirm on Alice’s helpless, defenseless body, the tips of its legs hooked tightly into her shirt, doing god-knows what to her, her scream turned from terrified to enraged.

How dare this thing be here, inside her. How dare it sit there, taunting her with its disgusting, wiggling eyes when this was her space?

It was not welcome here.

The entire space seemed to ripple in Rita’s eyes as she lunged forward, arms outstretched, towards it. All the hatred and revulsion she felt was directed straight at the horrific little trespasser in her soul.

Her fingers scraped the top of of Alice’s catatonic form as the squirmy eldritch cockroach-thing rapidly skittered out of the way.

The moment she touched down on the other side, she surged back to her feet, spinning around to make another grab at it. It stayed just barely out of her reach, clicking and chittering as it scuttled around, dodging her grabs and leaping over her arms. It kept slipping under and around Alice, forcing Rita to keep being careful in grabbing for it lest she hurt her by accident.

It kept ducking out of the way, skittering under and around Alice, just barely staying out Rita’s reach, chittering and clicking all the way.

Damnit! It was so frustrating!

Holy shit, this was so terrifying!

It took every bit of Ixxy’s agility to stay ahead as the giant skeletal thing grabbed for her with boney hands. It was much faster than anything that size had any right to be. Time after time the skeletal digits closed around the space where Ixxy had been mere moments before, barely having had time to scramble out of the way.

Her chest was burning, her arms and legs cramping from the constant scramble to stay ahead of the monster. Her heart was hammering mercilessly in her chest.

Sure, she didn’t think she could suffer real injury here, but she wasn’t certain. She’d certainly never encountered a giant, web-covered skeleton inside a soul before, so who the hell knew? Maybe it could hurt her!

This place wasn’t truly physical, but that didn’t make it any less real. If anything, it was more real for her than that crazy ‘physical’ world out there. The fatigue was certainly very real.

All it took was one mistake.

Ixxy, her legs burning from repeatedly leaping out of the way of grasping hands the size of wagons, didn’t quite stick her landing on a thick strand of web. She stumbled, a claw on her toe hooking into it, and nearly went tumbling off her landing spot and into the glowing void far down below.

As she slid down the side, she slammed her claws into the strand, arresting her fall before desperately trying to gather the leverage necessary to dive out of the way of the next swipe.

Unfortunately, that gap was all the skeletal monster needed.

Two giant, bony hands clamped around her body, squeezing her painfully as they tried to drag her away and into the air.

Ixxy did the only thing she could. She grabbed hold of the strand of web and held on for all she was worth, digging her finger and toe-claws in as deeply as she could.

The skeletal thing loomed over her, glowing pinpricks shone from the empty eye sockets as it stared down at her.

It’s mouth opened and… it spoke, in a deep, hollow voice that was somehow at odds with the words.

“Oh yeah? You think you can burrow into my brain? Get fucked, you disgusting bug!”

Then, before Ixxy could process that, it began pulling for all it was worth.

Finally, she’d managed to pin the disgusting thing down. Except now it had partially dug itself into the floor.

Well, tough shit. The floor was malleable. Rita’s fingers could push right into it, as if it was made of clay, because of course she could. This was inside her mind. Why wouldn’t the world reform itself exactly as she saw fit?

She wrapped her fingers a little more tightly around the gross little bug, ignoring the slimy feeling between her fingers or the flailing little needle-like legs patting against her skin.

“Oh yeah?” she hissed, standing over it. “You think you can burrow into my brain? Get fucked, you disgusting bug!”

Then she pulled with all her might. The thing had hooked its claws deeply into the soft floor, but she was not deterred. If it left a couple of legs behind when she tossed it out, she was okay with that.

She felt something give way, but it wasn’t a leg.

There was a loud ripping sound and suddenly she was falling!

The floor had ripped!

The bug was still in her hands, now flailing helplessly in the the air, but Rita’s eyes were glued on what lay far below her.

A lake. A glowing lake of essence, so vast it stretched almost as far as the eye could see. Greens and blues and other colours that had no name she knew of swirled among and around each other, somehow never quite mixing.

It was also a lake that was drying up. Patches of it were bare, just empty holes, almost like it was filled with a kind of thick goo, rather than liquid, and some gigantic entity had taken massive scoops out of it. She could see the smooth white of the bottom through them. And in the distance, a discolouration in the white of the wall of the lake showed how the level of it had dropped.

That was why she was always hungry! This was her ‘spiritual stomach’ and it was damn near empty!

Rita didn’t have any further time to ponder the details of what she was seeing. She looked back towards the bug in her hands as she felt it curl in on itself, and suddenly it wasn’t a bug at all.

Instead of a disgusting cockroach-thing, she was holding onto the tip of a massive, long tentacle stretching far off to the side, disappearing impossibly into the distance, like some kind of optical illusion. It was mottled and gray, looking almost just as disgusting as the bug she’d been holding before.

It hadn’t transformed. Instead, it was as if… as if the perspective had merely shifted. As if it had been a tentacle all along, just pretending to be a bug. Or maybe it was a bug that was now pretending to be tentacle?

Either way, before she could made a conscious decision to release the disgusting thing and take her chances splashing down into what had to be her own stomach — as crazy as that thought was — it lurched. With her hands still clenched around it, it dragged her up and out of her own Mindspace and before she knew it, she was standing back in Gora’s living room.

Ixxy was sprawled on her back, having stumbled backwards and tripped over her chair, staring up at Rita with wide eyes.

“What. The fuck,” she gasped. “Are you?”

Ixxy had seen it. The sump of Rita’s soul, which was filled with an absolutely gigantic pool of essence. A rather empty one, but still.

The real question was why? Why have such a gigantic essence capacity? Nothing Ixxy knew of could hold that much essence within themselves. Nothing. Not even demon bodies could hold that much.

At least… none of the new models like the one she was using. They didn’t need to. They were designed for efficiency, and only needed tiny amounts of the stuff. But the older models…

Did that mean Rita was a demon body of some kind? Some kind of experimental prototype that had somehow developed a mind of its own?

Was that even possible?

No. No, she was being silly. Demon bodies didn’t have souls, obviously. They didn’t even have room for them. And Rita definitely had a soul. Even if it was a bloody weird one.

However, if she had a soul, that meant she had Asomatous Essence. And if her soul could contain a lot of essence, that meant, logically, that it had to have a lot of Asomatous Essence to form its structure. And that meant that if Ixxy could swipe even a fraction of it, it could make her very, very rich.

Something else that had been weird, however, was when she’d tried to pull out, she’d felt something… pull back.

Something had tried to pin her perspective inside.

It was a terrifying thought, and sent a needle of actual fear through Ixxy.

Out here, in the ‘physical’ world, her body formed a layer of safety between her real self and anything that could harm her. Attempting to injure her real self with physical violence was, to put it in terms a mortal mind would understand, like trying break someone’s leg by dreaming at them really hard.

But there? Inside Rita’s soul? That had been a part of her real self, somehow sucked into that strange pseudo-space.

If she’d struck the glowing pool of pure essence down there, the feedback from that much essence could have seriously injured her. The real her. Which was why the thought of something attempting to hold her there had been so absolutely terrifying.

“Seriously, what the fuck are you?” Ixxy repeated, still sprawled on her back from where she’d tripped over the chair in shock.

For a moment, Rita blinked at her in stunned silence, before seeming to gather her thoughts.

“What the fuck am I? What the fuck are you?” Rita demanded back. “How did you get inside my Mindspace?”

By this time, the others had also reacted. The cambion had only taken a step closer, but the hunk quickly positioned himself protectively in front of Rita, weapon in hand.

Before Ixxy could formulate a reply, another little issue finally penetrated her awareness. She had literally seconds before her summoning ran out!

She’d completely lost track of time inside Rita!

Ixxy bit her lip. Timothy was going to be the one to set up the contract, so he was the one that had to know what she had found. Rita was freaked out and if she didn’t let him know, they could very well conclude that she was unable to help Rita and cancel the whole deal. Then all of Ixxy’s efforts would have been for naught.

Unfortunately, he was upstairs having some kind of fit and there was no time!

“I can do it! I can help you!” Ixxy blurted out, and slapped her palm down on the table.

It wasn’t exactly a clean solution, nor was it what they had agreed upon, but it was the only solution she could think of in the spur of the moment.

A piece of paper materialized in a puff of flame and sulphur, just in time for Ixxy to feel herself drop back into the lightless, immaterial depths of the summoning realm.

As she sped through this gloomy, unreal world back to Triorbus Square, the events of the last hour kept mulling through her head.

She’d found something. Something new. Something strange. Something no demon had likely ever encountered in this world before. And she couldn’t wait to investigate all the mysteries of the soul of this ‘Rita’ creature.

After she’d stolen it.