Interconnected: Spliced Souls

After touching the ground, Momo looked at her new surroundings and realized she was in a circular room filled with torches. That wasn’t so strange. And that green glimmer sparkling in the flames matched the ones she had seen littered throughout the shanty town.     

But the torches… They were made from spinal cords. And the stench of death was almost overbearing. As Momo turned to Albert to speak, the ground trembled beneath them, and with a sickening sound, a coup of rotted hands broke through the earth's surface. Fingers clawed desperately at the soil as monsters emerged, their decaying flesh clinging to their skeletal frames as they dragged themselves into the warm light emitting from the torches.   

Zombies…   

The undead.    

The work of a necromancer.   

The undead menaces shuffled eerily towards Momo with their arms held out, groaning like an unholy choir. Albert stepped in front and flourished his new weapon, piercing their heads with a flick of his wrist. He dispatched them without a problem.     

“This isn’t ideal,” he said. “Suusa didn’t mention anything like this. Are you okay, Momo?”   

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Her voice was oddly calm. She had long since gotten used to skeletons and zombies, so their appearance didn’t frighten her much, if at all. “But does this mean there’s a necromancer around?”   

“It could.” Albert shattered some blood crystals and formed a squadron of skeleton squires and a skeletal ravenwatcher. He ordered them to make haste slowly and watched them advance through a long, wide corridor. It was the only way to progress if you didn’t want to turn back.    

Albert also created another undead bird and sent it up through the shaft with orders to check on Sissy and the others. It didn’t take but forty or fifty seconds for the butler to sigh in relief—the other group hadn’t encountered any undead. Just a few golems and here and there.    

“Well, that’s good,” said Momo, happy her new friends didn’t have to deal with this.     

They discussed leaving, but Momo wanted to investigate a little more. They had enough blood crystals between the two to summon nearly 300 skeletal squires, but Albert suggested they make due with what he had created for the time being.     

Momo readied her sword and acid crossbow and advanced behind the unit of skeleton squires. Albert’s bird was reporting more basic zombies and not much else.    

The singi looked at the corpses hanging from bone hooks. Most were carved and missing body parts. The blood had long since dried.    

“Gggrroooaaannnnn…” Momo turned to the noise and only saw a pile of disorganized corpses.     

The one near the top moved and jerked its head back, groaning while reaching out with an arm missing most of its flesh.     

It didn’t have anything from the waist down.    

Two shots to the head from Momo’s crossbow killed it for good, but she took what Servi had said about zombies and severed its head. She almost flinched at how effortlessly her sword cut it like a hot knife through butter. She probably would’ve been too spooked to move if she hadn't become used to the undead in Servi's soul world.     

Albert noticed the slight discomfort in her bright eyes. “You can leave it to me if you wish,” he said.   

“I know, but I can handle it. I don’t want to be known as the girl who lets an immortal goddess and a revenant do everything for her.” That was another of Momo’s unmentioned worries. Her goal was to eventually surpass her grandfather. And she was okay with not being the strongest in the whole world. Her grandfather had a lot of help throughout his life, and logic dictated help would fall into Momo’s hands. To deny it would prove she was a shallow kitten who thought the continent wasn’t ready for her when it was the other way around.    

But this wasn’t it. She had no qualms about relying on friends since she’d do the reverse and offer them her strength to help them succeed.     

Albert summoned his phone and shot off a quick text. It buzzed, prompting Momo to inquire further.    

“Did you tell Itarr and Servy?”   

“I have. Servi's on her way here right now.” Albert added she couldn’t take any chances with a potential necromancer nearby. She needed their soul to unlock additional sub-categories within [Necromancy]. Momo asked why Albert couldn’t do it, but he said he didn’t have a ring. He added that all of his weaknesses as a revenant would vanish once Itarr figured out how to grant him one.    

“What about Fortuna? I thought she was fighting?”   

“She was until twenty minutes ago. Servi isn’t scheduled to return until tonight, and she believes the ones responsible will make their move.”    

“So, what does she want us to do? Should we wait for her?”   

“Not necessarily. Let’s continue while practicing caution.” Momo nodded and followed the revenant and his squires into the room at the end of the pathway.    

Six zombies stumbled around, and Momo watched as Albert’s undead tactfully dispatched them before exploring.     

The left door led to a research study covered in frayed books and a thick layer of dust. Momo’s eyes were drawn to an empty vial above a faintly burning candle. Albert approached and curiously looked at it from every single angle.    

“No. It couldn’t be. Momo, what do you see?”   

“Nothing? It’s empty.”   

“But it isn’t. At least, not for me. I see a red bubbling liquid.”   

“Souls are red, aren’t they?” Albert nodded. “So this is a soul drink or something?”   

“Yes, I believe it is. I feel something strange.” Albert lifted the vial and gently swirled it. He mentioned the existence of multiple ones, but he was clueless about how someone could merge several souls and blend them into a drink that could be consumed.  

“Let me carry it, and we’ll give it to Servy.” Momo gently placed it in her enchanted bag. She tapped her second favorite item and smiled. Her grandfather's beloved last-minute gifts to her had served her well. She honestly didn’t think she’d have gotten this far without it and her sword.     

Speaking of that, I better clean them tonight. I wonder if Itarr and Servy would like to help?   

Albert then turned to the books but found them too damaged to read and beyond repair.    

Finished, the group returned to the center room, bypassing the waiting skeletons and bird, and went into the room on the right and discovered an ancient, archaic bedroom.    

Albert spotted three more vials that Momo stored, but they discovered even more hidden inside the nearly broken furniture.    

“What if they’re booby-trapped?”   

“That is possible. If we are dealing with a necromancer, I wouldn’t put it past them to do something nefarious.” Momo knew her worries were for naught. Maybe she was getting used to Servi’s immortality because she made a small joke about how the worst discomfort she’d feel would probably be a slight stomach ache.     

Albert cracked a smile. “It really eases my heart to see you like this.”   

“I’m glad too. But I think I’m mainly calm because of the Foxy Me. Seriously, I’m relating to Servy’s and Itarr’s situation because of her.” Momo held a hand across her heart and closed her eyes. She briefly imagined what she thought was her soul world and waved to the woman with fluffy ears and a fluffier tail. Oh, how she could picture that beautiful, warm, inviting smile.    

The two returned to the central room and became perplexed. Suusa hadn’t mentioned anything about a dead end. The undead were one thing. Perhaps the room had traps that only activated when someone entered, so Suusa couldn’t detect it.    

So that left one option—a hidden path. There had to be one, and Momo unleashed her infinite crossbows across the wall until she struck an Illusionary wall.   

The skeletal ravenwatcher flew far and fast, and Momo and Albert jogged behind the squadron of squires. This progression lasted for another ten minutes, and the basic zombies and bottom-of-the-barrel skeletons posed no threat.    

It couldn’t have been that easy, but it was. Albert kept expecting a roadblock to either come crashing from the ceiling or smash up from the ground because the corridors and pathways were so large—about fifteen feet wide and twenty-five or thirty feet tall—but no. Those green flame-tipped torches made from extracted spinal cords weren’t some material that had an ulterior use in summoning a monstrous undead.    

They were just sadistic décor placed there by the occupants.     

The rooms were laid out the same—two or three studies or bedrooms connected to one hub, which held a hidden path to the next bridging pathway linking it to the next hub.    

The place was dilapidated. Momo wondered if this was an old base since it seemed like the inhabitants had packed up in a hurry to escape. Albert’s theory was much of the same. He likened these undead to being the weakest, so the necromancer wouldn’t bring them to their new base-- if they had one-- since it would be easier to recreate them.  

But that didn’t answer one question. Why was it located below a town built by golems? Did that come later? The timeline was fuzzy, but Albert needed a clue or two to piece the puzzle together.     

The undead were everywhere. Soon, it was like fighting through two or three hundred as the hordes advanced, stumbling over each other without care. Their minds merely focused on consuming the pretty singi’s flesh without a second worry. Momo’s crossbows made quick work if she hit the head. The most annoying enemies were the opposing skeleton squires and undead rats. They roamed in packs of ten to twenty and took multiple shots to dispatch, but Albert’s mastery of overseeing puppets gave him the commandeering prowess to lead his troops to a swift victory.    

But the more he thought about it…   

The more it felt like his use of [Create Low-Tier Undead] was lacking. They were the weakest undead, but there had to be more he could’ve done with it.   

Albert proclaimed his worries once they had reached one of the hub rooms. The undead bird watching Sissy’s group had reported they were resting, so he and Momo decided to do the same. “Sticking to what works may serve me well at the moment, but I must branch out. But it feels like I haven’t had the time. No... Maybe it’s this…” Albert looked at his hands. Beside him sat two green vials that only he could see. His theory was that they held the souls of necromancers since Myrokos’s quintessence shared that same verdant hue. Momo gently tossed them in her bag with the two dozen crimson vials they had discovered.    

“Being almost like an immortal?” Momo stretched as she sat, hugging her knees to her chest. She smiled at Albert. It wasn’t like him to speak like this, for the image she had in his mind painted him as someone who was always on top of everything.    

“Yes, that’s it. I don’t know how many times this body can perish, but I know it’s more than one. It’s childlike to think I could use it to solve my worries, so perhaps it’s not just my body that has regressed. The dichotomy of what I knew when I was alive and these new feelings and thoughts are difficult to grasp and make sense of.”   

“And is that so bad? That means you have a chance to grow and learn again, right? I…know your past. You couldn’t ever be a little boy who could run and play with the others. Life put you down another road, but you can change that. You can do what you couldn’t.”   

“It isn’t like I haven’t thought about what I’d do if I could have a second try.” Albert looked up at the dark abyss above them. It was so black he couldn’t see the ceiling, so who knew how large this room was. But the hanging corpses were as visible here as they were in the other hub areas.    

“I think we all have.” Momo thought about continuing, but she ended the dialogue and thought about what Albert had said.   

Suddenly, the phone she held between her gentle palms vanished. And an odd noise erupted from Albert’s phone when it suddenly manifested. It almost sounded like…a bell ringing?   

The butler grabbed it and obeyed the ‘slide to answer’ instruction, carefully holding it to his ear.    

A woman’s voice erupted from the speaker as if she was next to him. The clarity was astounding!    

“Servi?”   

“Eh? That’s her? Oh, I guess this means Itarr’s figured out the voice thingy? Yay!”   

“Okay… Alright. We’ll wait for you. Here.”   

“Eh? But how do I use this thing?” Momo grabbed Albert’s phone and obeyed his instructions. She merely held it like he did…   

“Momo?”   

“Woah… It’s like you’re right here… I know it’s just been a few hours, but it’s nice to hear your voice again. I guess I’ve been missing it.”   

“Same here. I never thought this would be possible, but Itarr’s a certified genius.”   

“Yeah. She’s super amazing. I wonder how she fixed whatever issue she was having?”   

“Well, why not let her explain?” queried the voice of a goddess. She had an ounce of confident smugness beneath her tone, proof of her victory over her toughest challenge.     

“Eh? Itarr? I thought… But how?”   

“Servi says it’s called a conference call. But…” Momo listened to an in-depth explanation that went so far over her head it reached the sun. The goddess was trying to recreate the ‘link’ she felt between ring holders—being her and Servi. But that was the wrong way to do it. It was far too advanced for her, but she stubbornly tried to force it. And that didn’t help her much.    

The goddess assumed that non-tangible aspects like speaking had to travel the pathway linking their rings. She underestimated just how powerful a Skill Phone could be and realized she didn’t have to recreate anything.    

The solution was always there, and the one she implemented was but one. It worked via a multilayer translation function that converted voice into text data, which was sent to a phone, where a function was designed to reverse the previous translation, which took the form of voice.    

It was only possible because she had altered their Skill Tablets to resemble a cellular communication device. It would not have worked had she made it anything else, which made her wonder how closely related the Skill Phone was to her blood crystals.    

The shape, after all, played a far more vital role than the goddess was led to believe, so she hypothesized future improvements would be easier to install now that she knew this.     

“Momo, trying to make it so you could text was the breakthrough I needed! Focusing hard on something else just… I can’t really describe the feeling, but thank you for helping!”   

“You’re welcome, I guess?”   

“You were the best tester I could ask for!”   

Aww… Itarr sounds so cute when she’s beaming with happiness like this.     

“Anyway, I’ll be there in a few minutes. I’m passing through that golem town or whatever.”   

“Do you see the church?”   

“Yep. Two holes, right? The left one?”   

“Uh-huh. But how did you get here so fast?   

“Well, it’s easy to travel when you can go full speed without stopping. Okay, I’m about to slide down. Talk to you soon, okay?”   

“Okie-dokie.”   

“Bye.”   

Click.   

Albert’s phone made a dull beep, and Servi’s voice vanished from the handheld device. Momo was just in so much awe at what she had just experienced.    

---

I knew it was a multilayer ploy the moment my opponents pop monotonia. Cassidy knew how much I hated those damn things, so I figured that was her way of telling me that the manager was behind the disappearances without him becoming suspicious.   

They’ve been the center of a bunch of bullshit, so why would it ever end here? Trouble would follow if I walked along the pill-bricked road.    

“And…” Momo took a moment to gather her thoughts after I had told her everything. “Cassidy…knew who was behind it the whole time? She just couldn’t tell you because she was being watched?”  

“Yep. That’s my theory. But more than watched. I think she’s being blackmailed or forced into making phrine because I didn't see her after the manager ended the fight. And she wasn’t at her shop, either, when I got there. But the manager told me to return tonight to triple my money. He probably won't honor it because I’ll go from 120,000 dupla to 360,000.”  

Th—that much?!” Momo’s eyes almost popped out of her head.   

“They’re in 1,000 dupla coins. Itarr said she’s going to make a treasury for us.”   

“But aren’t you mad at Cassidy?” inquired Momo. She blinked twice. “She kinda sold you out, didn’t she?”  

“If we assume the manager and Fortuna are her primary clients, then they would act to ensure the drug thrives and prospers,” added Albert. “Cassidy pretended you posed a risk and guided you to the underground arena to set the events into motion.”  

“And you’re totally okay with that?” Momo asked again.   

“Yep. Cassidy has faith in me, or she wouldn’t have done this. She knows I can get it done. This kind of trouble won’t be a problem. But don’t worry. I’ll—”  

“You’ll be fine?” I nodded. “I know. But I’ll still worry. And that’s why…” Momo jumped towards me, locking her arms around mine, and hugged me tightly. “You owe me a hug or two. That’s the price you have to pay, okay?”  

“It’s a little too expensive, but I can afford it.” I changed the topic to the current situation. The squires and ravenwatcher stood patiently nearby.   

“Oh, and we found this.” Momo retrieved red and green vials and laid them on the ground. They appeared empty to her, but…  

They were souls.    

“I feel something strange from it,” said Itarr, her voice coming from my phone—it was on speaker.    

She absorbed the vial and exclaimed in surprise that it…was a soul? No—it was more than that.  

“Servi! There’s 100 souls here!”  

“How the hell did they liquidize then?!”  

“I have no idea.” Itarr was dumbfounded. “I cannot sense any strength from them. It’s…”  

“Like the power they once held was squeezed out?” asked Momo.   

“Yes. Something like that. What’s left us 100 souls that could barely be called souls. But adding them to our stockpile will give us more Soul Points to work with. Should I do it?”  

“Yeah. We need the power.” Itarr said she didn’t know how to do it, so she just…drank it.  

Well, that was one way to do it, I guess.   

“What does it taste like?” Momo’s curiosity extended to her twitching tail, but Itarr said it was flavorless. Presumably, whatever process squeezed out their strength had drained it of taste.  

“But… Wait a second…” Momo’s confused expression blinked twice more as the gears in her head turned. “If the quantity of the souls matter more than the quality, couldn’t you have just killed a ton of monsters?”  

Albert chimed in. “The strength of your absorbed souls correlates to your power. Focusing on quantity would render you weaker in the short term. However, considering your unique situation, I believe that is a path we must consider.”  

“You think so?” I turned to Momo, and she nodded, saying it wouldn’t hurt to have a fat sack of Soul Points in my pocket. “Okay, then. I guess we’ll start monster hunting after this. I suppose the guild in Adenaford seems like a good place to work out of.”  

“Definitely. Oh, but don’t forget about these.” Momo laid out the soul drinks, and Itarr absorbed and drank the remaining crimson and verdant-colored vials.   

As we expected, the two green ones held the drained soul of a necromancer. Momo asked how we felt because she thought they could be trapped or cursed, but Itarr said she felt fine.    

All in all, we had drank over 1,000 souls and 2 NP, so it was time to get stronger.   

I spent most of it and purchased [Create Mid-Tier Undead], which granted me access to more advanced zombies, skeletons, and things like wights and ghouls. Mummies also counted, but we soon discovered they needed over 500 blood crystals to make just one.   

“That many for a single one?! Isn’t that too much?”  

“Maybe? But I’ve linked the skill’s activation method to a blood crystal vault I created in the tower. I’m here producing some more.” Itarr added that she connected Albert’s manifestation to the vault, so a crystal was automatically used whenever his time ran out. One would be expended to heal his wounds-- provided the attack didn't kill him. 

“But you have to cut yourself to make them, right?” Itarr answered Momo’s question and assured her it didn’t hurt.  

There had to be a way to increase their purity and make one count as five or ten. 

“Be ready, okay?” The others nodded, and half a thousand crystals were gone in a flash. “[Create Mid-Tier Undead – Mummy]!” The edge of my scythe flashed a deep red, and I sliced the ground. A crimson sigil etched itself into existence. A torrent of wind scattered our hair, and the pressure increased as skill energy crafted my chosen undead.    

And there it was.    

I stared at the mummy. The bandages were already dirty and soiled. Decayed flesh peeked from where they were loose, and black mist slightly radiated from its body.   

“Greetings, Lord Servi,” said the mummy in a raspy voice. It kneeled and held a hand over its heart.   

“You can speak?!”  

“Indeed, Lord Servi. Were you not aware?”  

“Nope. Itarr?”  

“This is news to me.”  

“Woah…” Momo looked at the mummy from all angles with awe in her eyes.    

“Shall I explain?” I nodded, and the mummy said mid-tier and high-tier undead differed from low-tier. On top of being stronger and more durable, each ‘sub-species- of mid-tier undead, albeit mummy, ghoul, ghost, etcetera, were given a pool of personalities. One would be assigned to them at the moment of their creation. “This mummy cannot guarantee it will be the same one should it perish and you choose to summon another one.”  

“And are you fine with that?”  

“I am. We are expendable. We serve to answer the whims of our creator, Lord Servi. Speak your orders, and we shall fulfill them.”  

“…” That didn’t sit right with me. Yes, I used those zombies and skeletons as disposable pawns, but they couldn’t speak. And yes, I could summon another mummy. They weren’t really people. They were just…a skill, right? An ability to be used over and over again...  

“Take those squires and scout head for me. Use the bird, too. I want to see how you act as a unit.”  

“As you wish…” The mummy stood and walked away, leading the other undead down a hidden path Momo had found earlier.    

“Wait, the mummy said something about a ghost, right? Is that a low-tier?” asked Momo. She walked to the corridor and watched as my minions shuffled down. She could already hear the sound of fighting.    

I checked my phone and suddenly remembered the help menu built into the [Forbidden Skill System] app. Yep. There it was. Everything that mummy had told me.   

I felt like a jackass. I was taking this shit too laxly. Albert slightly chuckled when I proclaimed this and said he felt somewhat similar. “Seems like we need to remedy that,” he said.   

“Yeah. We can’t get lax just because we’re harder to kill. That’s no excuse.”  

“Agreed. Now, do you have any other catalysts unlocked? If I recall, you can swap to Myrokos’s dagger.”  

“It’s just that and the scythe. I wonder if the catalysts were removed from the soul?”  

“Anything is possible,” Albert replied. He gave me his bracelet with [Create Low-Tier Undead], and I upgraded it. Itarr configured some stuff behind the scenes and connected it to our blood crystal vault. I then turned to my phone and scrolled through the help menu until I found it.    

Ghosts.   

Yep.   

They had low-tier and mid-tier subspecies. 

“Itarr, please smack me the next time I visit you…” She asked why, and I just sighed because…  

Yeah…  

The ghosts only required a handful of crystals. They were transparent and floated a few inches above the ground. They couldn’t really cause physical harm, but they were ghosts.   

They could fly through walls and shit!  

“You know,” Momo said, walking around the intangible presence. “My grampy used to tell me scary stories about ghosts. Well, not totally scary, but they were spooky. I never thought I’d see one in the flesh—err, in the spirit, I mean.”  

I knew Sissy and the others were fine, but I told the ghost to help keep an eye on them with the ravenwatcher. It flew away and obeyed my order.    

The mummy and ghost reported via telepathic connection, and the range was longer than I thought.   

Itarr realized that things could be hard to follow once I had dozens or hundreds of created minions, so she designed an app to transmit my orders or commands to any undead in service. Since she knew about notifications from a prior discussion, she discovered a way to transform the information received by my undead into a notification and categorized them. She performed the same update on Albert’s phone, too. I told my mummy to send anything back, and…  

Can you read this, Lord Servi?  

The banner notification appeared with a small ding, and it was from the mummy.    

Yes, I can. Thank you. Please continue.    

While telepathically communicating was faster, I wanted a log with time stamps. A verifiable history, if you will. And having something like this meant I could always text my undead if I somehow happened to be in an area where telepathy was banned or blocked.  

It seemed messages with personalization could only come from mid-tier and above. The low-tiers sent vague updates. They were more like a feeling than something concrete.   

“It works! I’m so glad!” Itarr’s passionate voice danced from my phone, and I knew she was jumping for joy in our soul world.    

 She really leaned into her role as a creator/developer. It was totally adorable to see her conquer each challenge and continually improve our phones.   

“Okay, so why don’t we start moving?” I stretched my arms. “We don’t want to make Sissy and the others wait.”    

“Sounds like a plan. Let’s go.”   

We followed the mummy and skeletons, and Momo, Albert, and Itarr discussed what I wanted to use my 2 NP towards.    

The sub-categories were the following: [Bone Conjuration], [Corpse Manipulation], [Life Manipulation], [Decay], [Curse], and [Brainwash].   

The first gave me spells that involved bone as its primary element, so [Create Bone Weapon], [Skeletal Wall], [Skull Bomb], and [Bone Pit].   

The second enabled me to alter a corpse through sculpting, or I could rig it to explode.   

The third seemed interesting… [Heart Clutch] was within my Soul Point budget, and if I could fuel its cost with a blood crystal, it’d give me a boon in combat. I doubt I could kill everything with it, but it would certainly help. [Soul Drain] and [Vitality Leech]… Nothing in my current arsenal attacked the soul, but those were out of my budget.  

But why would [Heart Clutch] be in [Life Manipulation]? That doesn’t seem like the proper category.  

[Decay] was the go-to for area-of-effect attacks. [Foul Cloud] and [Pestilence Burst] seemed effective at clearing a room—provided my enemies didn’t have a way to become immune. Beings requiring oxygen would be at risk if they didn’t have a filter or a purifying spell. And I presumed undead were immune to it.  

[Curse] seemed less helpful than the rest, and the skills within [Brainwash] were grossly expensive. And just forcing a mind to submit to my will, carving their memories like meat in a grinder, and rewriting a person’s sense of self made me feel icky. Because I kept thinking about Lucy and how the girl Nimyra had known wasn’t really Lucy.    

But this couldn’t have been it.   

I didn’t see anything about resurrecting the fallen without any strings attached. And since most of Itarr’s other skills were marked as prototypes, it wasn’t a stretch to consider [Necromancy] unfinished. It didn’t have the label, but I could chalk it up to a minor mistake.   

I went with [Bone Conjuration] and [Life Manipulation]. More magic to freely wield wouldn’t hurt at all. I just had enough Soul Points to buy [Heart Clutch].   

I tested it on a zombie, and it didn’t work.   

That was obvious, but I learned it needed 10 blood crystals to activate peruse, and that was the only requirement. It didn’t have a cooldown period other than chanting the name.    

I turned my aim to myself—because why not. Momo gave me this crazy-eyed look and told me to be super careful.    

“[Heart Clutch].”  

Suddenly, I felt something in my palm. The skill said it allowed me to grab a phantom representation of my target’s heart. I could do nothing, end the skill, apply pressure, which would mimic a heart attack if I kept squeezing or induce death by forming a fist and destroying it, but it wasn’t the end all be all.   

I was sure people could shrug it off. Or maybe there were armor or skills to increase magic resistance. It was, no doubt, very powerful and worthy of being called a forbidden skill.  

But I ended the spell, and the ‘heart’ I felt softly in my palms vanished.   

Itarr took a break from pricking her wrists and reconfigured my skills. She moved the help menu to make it easier to find. And some information, according to her, was hidden but not showing, was now visible.   

This included a detailed list of every undead split by species, sub-species, the tier required to create them, and their cost in blood crystals, cementing my theory.    

The category was just unfinished. There would always be improvements to make.   

As a creator, Itarr echoed my hypothesis and said [Heart Clutch] didn’t belong to [Life Manipulation].  

“The heart’s seen as a symbolic center of life and vital energy,” I said. “I guess I'm ‘connecting’ to my target’s ‘core’— which could be an indirect definition of manipulating their life force via their heart. You gotta stretch the meaning for it to make sense, though. Then again, you can stretch many things and connect them to unrelated matters, so... Who knows? It doesn’t seem like it’s broken. It works fine—as far as I can tell.”  

“Well… It is, I think,” replied my goddess. “I’m going to look into it. Maybe there’s something I can find? It’s…almost unreadable, but maybe I’ll make sense if I stare at it long enough.”  

“Oh, here you go.” Momo returned the wrist-mounted acid crossbow to me. “I almost forgot to give it back.”  

“You don’t need it?”  

“Not when I have you here.” She smiled. I dissolved the weapon and enchanted the skill onto another blood crystal shotgun.