His minds had already been moving at top speeds so he was the first to react, even if there was little in the way of what he could do. Of the few things he had in his pocket, he’d prepared some poisons, but there were a dozen monsters standing around them, quadrupedal and looking like solid lumps of skin other than the teeth and claws at their disposal, both natural weapons that were more like razors ready to tear into flesh than anything one would normally encounter as he did the first thing he could think to try. He connected with them.

For a second he thought it didn’t work. There was always the chance that after awakening, deep connection had become a magic skill, blocking it in that phase of the trial, but that wasn’t what happened. He was experiencing their senses as his skill would allow and was going to scream into their minds, intending to spook them long enough to give him some leeway, but there was no point. There was no mind to scare, they were basically nothing more than empty dolls, lacking any semblance of thought or soul.

Homunculi.

He didn’t immediately understand what they could be for and didn’t have much leeway for figuring it out. They weren’t the only ones after all, there was an entire swarm of different creatures bearing down on them, very much conscious of their presence as they rushed forward in a horde, moving as one and at best minutes away.

And we absolutely have to fight them because of course they included another freaking combat section in a tower devoted to life magic! But how are we supposed to… Right, okay, that makes sense.

“Thera!” He yelled, not seeing any need to explain that they still hadn’t gotten any of Jake’s floors when it was so obvious. “Everything around us is a homunculus, I’d bet money we’re supposed to use these things to fight so this is all you.”

He at least allowed himself a moment of comfort, the knowledge that she had experience with homunculi thanks to her aunt Vividus gave him the brief feeling that things might not be too bad, right until he turned to face her, seeing a hint of panic in her eyes.

“Vividus only taught me how to make them, I have no idea how I’m supposed to actually control them with life magic!”

“Okay, not good. Steph?”

“No clue!”

“Sonya or Sachel?”

They both shook their heads as Ben was confronted with the situation, but strangely enough, what he was feeling wasn’t panic but relief. Ever since entering the second floor and realizing he’d been wrong, he’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but nothing really bad had happened. Each section had been so easy that it only put him more on edge with his expectations that something would go wrong. Now that it finally had, a surprising amount of tension managed to leave him in spite of their situation as he stopped focusing on what might happen and instead devoted himself to the problem at hand.

Alright, so that leaves us with Thera killing them all with her life magic which isn’t ideal but it’s possible at least, but that means they’ll basically be right on us so we want to close the distance a bit first and have a better option for getting away.

“Okay, plan time,” Ben announced as he already started enacting it, filling one of the homunculi’s bodies with his mind to make it kneel down as he picked Thera up and placed her on its back, sitting behind her himself. “I’m controlling the few of these I can and we’re going up to the group for Thera to use her magic. You guys are in charge of saving us if anything goes wrong.”

He didn’t give any time for argument as he instead rushed off, bringing the few other homunculi he could with him. Given that the current range of deep connection was two meters in any direction, that placed him squarely in a four-meter circle, without much room to take full advantage of what the trial had provided. Of the twelve available, he was able to get five total, and from there dealt with the issue that was making them move.

Ben wasn’t a quadruped. He had two legs as anyone would expect from a human, along with only one knee on each of them unlike what he was learning from the creature he had mounted, with the direction they would bend being different too. Moving was an entirely different beast compared to what he was used to and he was forced to split his minds evenly for the task of just making the bodies do what he wanted as he forced himself to learn as fast as he could, putting his new knowledge skill to the work as he tried to absorb the subtleties that came with essentially inhabiting such a creature, while what he had left was able to see something he’d been wrong about. They weren’t facing a horde of creatures, instead going against one giant one.

The mistake was understandable, at least from a distance. The thing was a mass of flesh, tens of meters across and constantly shifting in form as patches that at first looked like scales turned to fur, then shell, and changing more from there, the living blob sprouting arms and legs, tentacles and claws, all at random before they were retracted back into itself to change yet again.

“How much closer do we need to get?” He asked, feeling disgusted to be seeing such a thing and not getting the answer he wanted.

“Unless we want to risk me accidentally making it more powerful, we need to get pretty close. I don’t want to risk my life mana spreading through it instead of overstimulating it so I need to be able to understand how it works if I want to make it fail.”

“Very much not the answer I was hoping for but okay, hold on tight.”

He pushed the homunculi all the harder to get closer and felt winded despite himself. While his true body wasn’t moving, he was being forced to experience what the five under his command were going through as he pushed them, feeling like he was running himself as both sides closed the distance, the time till they collided being nothing more than seconds away as Thera screamed in his ear.

“We have a problem, I can’t kill it!”

“What?”

“Its body isn’t set up like a normal animal! I can’t cause tissue to grow to block any internal pathways because there are no internal pathways! It’s more like a mass of cells than anything else!”

So the gods really wanted us to be using the homunculi then? That’s a problem but I guess it’s something we have no choice but to deal with.

“Okay, I guess this means we’re going with the intended method, sure hope this works!”

With that he got closer, directing two of the homunculi under his command forward as the monster reacted to them, stretching its strange body parts out in an attempt to grab as he forced them to weave around them, bending and contorting themselves to snap their heads back to bite down, tearing meat from the larger mass and spitting them out as he dealt with the horrid taste filling mouths that were not his own as he took a moment to make sure it had worked.

For a brief, horrible moment he worried that the pieces might start moving again, but in his small bit of fortune that wasn’t the case. Almost instantly he watched the two unnatural limbs decay, whatever life they had lost when not part of the greater whole as he forced both homunculi at the front to keep up the attack, the one he was riding avoiding everything the best he could to keep both him and Thera safe as the last two helped with it, swiping at attacks that tried to get around the sides.

The entire task felt monumental. Given the size of the thing they were against, it would be a constant act of biting and tearing, whittling the thing down into its smallest of parts for who knew how long, but he thought that as long as he was careful then they had a shot. It wasn’t going to be something easy, but then, facing a tower was never meant to be. All they needed was to keep going and keep their hope up, the same hope that came crashing down as moments later the two he had on the attack seized up and collapsed to the ground, quicking being swallowed into the thing before them.

Shit.

It only took a second to understand what had happened. Poison, something that wouldn’t take immediate effect but would happen all at once the second it did, basically halving the fighting force he had with him as he was forced to move the remaining two to the front to defend them.

“Thera, they’re being poisoned by something that makes their muscles lock up, think you can deal with it?”

“I’ll try.”

Good enough, that leaves where to go from here. If she can’t heal these ones then we’ll need to run back to get more, but as long as she buffs the one we’re riding we’ll win out on speed. The problem is that it will give this thing time to get closer to the others, so we need another way to attack. Unless maybe we don’t? What are the odds this thing is technically a homunculus as well?

Taking the risk, he forced himself closer, getting the thing in the edge of his range as he reached out, opening the connection and feeling the mind within.

It felt wild and primal and very much there, a sure sign they were going against a properly ensouled creature rather than some preprogrammed husk that he could have potentially taken advantage of, but that created a different option for them.

It was something he thought might be effective from the moment he’d understood what was happening in his head as he carefully unblocked his thoughts for that creature alone, filling it with the full force of his mind as it pulled back in shock but otherwise seemed unaffected.

Okay, not what I was hoping for. Really thought it would have died, but then based on what Thera said it probably doesn’t have a brain to fry and is instead having its mental load carried by its entire body. Which means if I want any sort of success with this idea I might need to do something crazy.

“Hey Thera, I need you to not panic about what’s about to happen.”

“I hate hearing that Ben!”

“Too late.”

In one swift motion, his hand was wrapped around a knife in his pocket, ripping it out and plunging it in his thigh as he tried to keep from screaming, forcing all of his minds to indulge in the pain as he kept up the connection to the monster before them, watching it spasm in reaction, not understanding what was happening but suffering from it anyway as Ben directed the two homunculi to tear into it in it’s more vulnerable state as he tried to keep aware of the beasts panicked flailings, all while Thera screamed in his ear.

“What are you doing, you absolute maniac! Take that out right now so I can heal you already!”

“The best bet to keep it disoriented was connecting with it, and since using all my minds didn’t work I needed to go a bit more extreme. It’s working, isn’t it?”

The words were squeezed out through clenched teeth but there was no denying he was right. He was expertly controlling the homunculi to rip and tear away pounds of flesh, having the two creatures work in tandem to get more than they could when they were split up as large chunks of whatever the beast before them was were sliced away and teeth and claws ripped and dug, all while Thera had a different major concern.

“You cut clean through an artery, you’re going to bleed out you idiot! Take that out so I can close it and stab yourself through the hand if you have to so badly!”

Ah, yeah, not ideal.

He didn’t particularly want to have to stab himself again but he wanted to die even less so he did as she said, ripping out the knife as she started treating it, swearing at him the entire time as he went for his hand instead, feeling a whole new realm of pain jet up his arm as it went through, with the creature responding to the new stimulus he shared as it tried to escape with nowhere to go. As long as Ben was close by, it would keep feeling it.

And I think I can do more from here too.

Even as he suffered from his own actions he wanted to push further so he grabbed the monster’s mind tight as he began disassembling his own, wrapping his thoughts around it and filling them with the pain he felt as it was unable to escape, all while the homunculi tunneled through its flesh, weakening the beast all the more as it slowly died, losing its mass until eventually they were sitting before a creature no more than a meter in size.

Its shifting had stopped by that point, being locked into a chimeric form of mismatched parts as Ben forced the creatures under his thrall to finally finish it off, bringing an end to that stage.

Did I really just gain a skill from the homunculi I was using?

The puppetry skill at least made a little sense to him, even if it seemed misplaced. He’d been working his minds to control the homunculi the entire time, beings that could be described as empty dolls or puppets. The normal way of using them involved ordering them with life magic, but the way he had to had been far more hands-on.

Or minds on I guess. Skills are at least a bit related to the limits of the body, since I was kind of inhabiting another body, was I able to learn an unusual skill?

He clenched his jaw, feeling more force than he normally would from such a thing as he imagined possibilities. He might not have had much need for the skill he just gained, but there were a lot of implications for what the fact that he could gain it in such a way meant. Implications to consider later since his thoughts were brought back to his hand as Thera tore the knife out of it to start healing the damage.

“Ben, who the hell just stabs themself like that? Let alone twice!”

“It was maybe a little rash, but it seemed like a good way to keep that thing from trying anything. And hey, it totally worked.”

She didn’t both responding to that as the other three raced over, having watched from a distance but not understanding the finer details until they got close.

“Why is Ben covered in blood?” Was the first thing Sonya asked, not sounding as concerned as maybe she should have been given her profession. She knew her niece had things well in hand, as did Steph. It was only Sachel who looked at all worried seeing the blood as Thera answered.

“This floor was a bit more difficult than we thought so Ben decided to solve it by stabbing himself.”

“There’s a bit more nuance than that,” He said in his defense as he described what they just deal with, how basic life magic couldn’t kill it and how they had no choice but to fight it with the homunculi, ending with why he decided to try and keep the odds in their favour with the admittedly rash act. “The longer this took, the more time there was for something to go wrong.”

None of them seemed to like the answer, but Ben stood by it. There was no way to know what might have happened if they let things stretch on. What if the creature decided it was bored of them and wanted to go for the easier targets in the back, or it got used to the way he was fighting given just how few homunculi he had to control at one time?

Thera knew it too, she just didn’t like it. She understood that thousands of years of her world's culture had been shaped by the knowledge that they’d one day be fighting for their planet, but she hated that it was extending to even the life tower, making it so much more combat-oriented than it seemed like it should have been. The floor definitely hadn’t gone well compared to the others, but she made do, telling herself that it was just one of four as they got up and looked at the door that had appeared in place of the beast's corpse.

“Well, shall we go on?” Ben asked, looking amongst the others.

They were all a bit more hesitant after what they’d seen, running into a challenge that they hadn’t actually been prepared to face, leaving them a bit more worried about what might be to come.

Not that it matters now since we don’t have a choice but to finish the next floor.

Still, he gave them the minute they needed to collect themselves, trying his best to be encouraging before they stepped through the door, his minds already in a flurry of movement to process everything as he saw that once again, they hadn’t gotten any of Jake’s floors, when his eyes locked onto the new one’s gimmick and he charged into a sprint before anyone behind him could see and stop him.