The alteration went on for quite a while.
By the time Serandur had finished tending the wounded and Albena and Alia had stripped the field, they still didn't rush him; they simply kept watch in a loose ring around Gauss.
He could feel something new budding in his throat—some specialized gland forming—and a faint rigidity settling in. Even the skin along his neck, his jaw, the tissues of his mouth were subtly toughening under the slow, pervasive wash of energy.
Places that used to be weak points were, under the blessing of this "Elementary Draconic" gift, quietly reinforced in tandem.
"Ahem. …Ah—"
He opened his eyes and cleared his throat on reflex.
The sound that came out didn't seem different at first. But when he listened to it, he could sense a change he couldn't quite name.
More… substance?
He shook his head. If he had to put it into words, it was like upgrading a music app back in his previous life—from "standard" or "HQ" to proper hi-res lossless. The voice was the same voice, but the way it felt landed a few tiers richer.
And—
It wasn't just timbre. Something about it had shifted at the level of magic. If he willed it, he could shunt a trickle of mana through that newly altered throat and cast with it.
A minute ago he'd been disappointed at pulling "Elementary Draconic." Now, without noticing, he'd let the disappointment go.
"Charisma +1."
"CHA: 10 → 11."
He thought it over and found it made sense. Voice is a big slice of "charisma"—that blend of presence, warmth, and aesthetic appeal. Someone can be gorgeous, but if they speak in a grating croak or a jarring drawl, the spell breaks for most folks. There's a reason "voice fetish" is a thing.
"Uh—ah—"
He tested it a few more times. In his head, whole lattices of new phonemes sat waiting—a block of "dragon-tongue" data. For now he left it alone. It felt like a compressed archive had been rammed into his skull; he'd need time to unzip it, sort it, make it his.
[Elementary Draconic (Novice): Without diluting your native bloodline, you gain fragments of draconic speech and the physiological adaptations to produce them. Once fully internalized, this becomes true Draconic.]
[Draconic: The language of dragons is itself imbued with magic; spoken with intent, it can bend reality to the speaker's will.
You gain a small chance to grasp slivers of dragon-only sorcery that mortals normally cannot learn.
Your vocal apparatus is partially reinforced, improving your ability to produce and carry Draconic utterances.
Next racial draw unlocks when Common Bestiary unique types reach 100.]
The write-up was simple; the implications were not. Even so, he grasped the shape of it: dragon magic was less "memorized spellwork" and more "awakened capability." Where mortals leaned on study and technique, dragons spoke power into being. Draconic was a channel, not just a code.
Hephaestus had been exiled as a beast not because he lacked fangs or fire, but because the inheritance had never seated in him; with no spark of that language-born knowing, his dim mind would never climb to where dragons lived.
And him? Human as he had been, he was stepping, piece by piece, onto a drake's road.
He asked himself, briefly, if "human" still fit. Then he let it go. He wasn't the sort to eat with one hand and curse the cook with the other. In this world, dragons stood on the summit.
If he could borrow their gifts without losing himself—Special Stomach, Ironscale, a throat that could breathe sorcery, a reservoir of mana, a body that didn't break, a hunger to feed it, that feral shape, and now the first syllables of Draconic—he wasn't going to pretend he wasn't grateful. If anything, it felt less like mutation and more like maturation.
Most important: his head was clear. No creeping animal fog, no instincts whispering to kneel or rend. Whatever the handbook had done to fit these traits to him, it had kept his mind his own.
He glanced at the little pile of Elite Points he'd banked—132 of them. Elementary Draconic sat there in his status as a white-grade trait, ripe for promotion. He could bump it to blue with a thought.
He didn't. Not here, not with a rescued villager watching and a half-finished job. Better to digest what he'd just been handed and upgrade safely back in town. No sense pushing a live patch mid-cast and finding a bug the hard way.
When he looked back up, his companions had drifted a little closer. No one said much—Maggie was still there—but a few nods passed between them. They'd all felt something. He gave a small nod back.
"Captain, done?" Alia asked.
"Yeah."
"Oh?"
Albena, who'd been steadying herself after the spider-ridden gore, tipped her head. She was sure his voice had changed; she just couldn't say how. Only that it was… nicer. Hearing him say her name a breath later made her knees go weak in an utterly ridiculous way.
"Can you… say my name?" she blurted.
Gauss blinked. Then, indulgent, "Albena."
A tremor went through her. The syllables landed like a touch. He saw her flush deepen, realized he'd let mana run with the sound by habit, and clamped down. The next words came out merely beautiful, not bewitching.
Alia opened her mouth—then thought better of it and swallowed the request. There was work to do.
"You're from a village nearby?" Gauss turned to the rescued woman. "What's your name?"
"Yes, mage. My name is Maggie." Even now, her heart skittered like a rabbit's, but the man's presence steadied her. "I came with my father, my uncle, and two from our village. We chased a beast and wandered into the fog. We got separated. Please—help me find them."
"Understood." He nodded. "I've already sent familiars. They're scouting the area."
The clay goblins he'd loosed were still ranging, feeding his mind with a constant drip of impressions. He let the morphing network sift itself into a picture. If Shadow were here, it would go faster—her ink-slick talent made other people's scouting look like fumbling in the dark. He found himself hoping she'd finished her advancement. Knowing his newfound notoriety, it wouldn't take her long to track him to the lake.
"Give me a moment."
He closed his eyes, rode the trickle of sights and smells as the clay scouts fanned out. Filter, correlate, decide—
He pointed. "There. We start that way."
Maggie's legs were still rubbery despite Serandur's work. Alia whistled, and Ulfen padded over, bowing to let the girl climb onto his back. Gauss weighed leaving her with a guard, then shook his head. Safer to keep everyone together. If things went ugly, he'd whistle up Hephaestus and lift them out.
They moved quickly through the mire.
They found a scatter of clean white bones.
From the color and the way the ends had dried, they were fresh. No flesh remaining—licked away, most likely, by a thousand little mouths.
"Is this your kin?" Gauss asked.
Maggie went gray. Her eyes filmed as she took in the tatters of cloth, the personal trinkets strewn in the muck.
"It's… Uncle Martin," she whispered at last.
Gauss nodded and said nothing. He'd already feared as much. It was a cruel calculus, but in spider country, it was always the bigger prey that vanished first. A grown man fed a brood longer than a girl like this. The only reason she'd lasted as long as she had was probably because she'd been marked and watched—kept for later.
He left a clay goblin at her side and kept moving. Kill the nest; then talk.
As they went, more sign surfaced: a snapped buckle here, a torn sleeve there. He saw her face set like wet clay hardening, felt the hope leach out of her.
He drew a breath. Behind his gaze, the scouts painted a clearer map. An island of packed ground rose out of the muck ahead—a proper lair. Two ettercaps within. The one he'd gutted had been a hunter out on patrol.
"All right." He glanced at the others. "They're up ahead on that hummock. Two. Shadow's not here, so we do it by the book."
He looked at Albena. "You really okay?"
"I am, Sir Gauss." Her voice hitched; she swallowed and steadied. She was the sort who feared and smashed things anyway.
"Mind your footing." He drew a breath and let a thin skein of shimmering force settle over each of them—his ward sliding over skin and leather like a second skin. "Move."
They splashed forward.
"Whump!"
Albena's great shield ripped a path through a curtain of webbing. The lair was a cathedral of silk, gray sheets draped from trunks and matted across the ground, everything wrapped in sticky shroud.
On the far wall, two ettercaps clung to their own architecture, eight black eyes glittering.
Unlike Albena, Gauss felt a little flicker of dark appreciation. He liked these creatures for one reason: if you took their minds, their brood fought to the last. No rout, no messy mop-up. He wished more enemies had that kind of… spine.
"Those two are yours," he said. "Pin them. Don't kill. I'll clear the thralls, then help you finish."
He said it again, for emphasis. There was no sense in throwing away leashes he could use to keep the swarm from breaking.
Albena nodded, drawing a deep breath, the big shield settling into place. A good fighter could turn off thinking and win on pure habit.
On Ulfen's back, Maggie had noticed a headless corpse in a tangle of roots. Her lips trembled. Beside it lay a bow she knew as well as her own hands—her father's bow. The sight hollowed her out.
Gauss saw it and wanted to say something; couldn't find the words. He whistled, and a handful of clay goblins popped up from the mud. He left one at her stirrup. Shadow would have known what to say. He… moved on.
"Now!"
The brood boiled.
"Cloud of Knives!"
He breathed out, a ribbon of force that erupted into a storm of spinning blades. Since his throat's change, breath-casting came that much easier; the magic rode his voice like it had found a native channel.
The knife-storm scythed out. Webbing that would have taken minutes to cut by hand shredded in a heartbeat. The thralls in its path went to meat, dark ichor misting the air. Behind him, the swamp steamed where falls of stray flame had baked the mud to ceramic.
He hung in the air like a gunship and kept cutting, while Albena and Serandur entwined the two ettercaps in steel and snares, battering them senseless without quite ending them.
On Ulfen's back, Maggie pulled her father's bowstring to her cheek, eyes burning red, and began to pick spiders off the flanks, arrow after arrow stitching through chitin.
In another life, with coin for a teacher, she would have made a hell of a huntress. As it stood, grief hardened quickly into something sharp.
By the time the last thrall went down and the echoes died, the nets around the ettercaps sagged with their limp, twitching bodies. The kill feed ticked past 8,400.
Gauss finally let himself look back at the bow in the girl's hands. He was already turning over a thought. When they got back to town, he'd buy a beginner's archery technique and put it in her palm. Give her something to hold onto besides a corpse.
Violence begets violence. Maybe she'd be the next Spider Slayer.
~~~
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