While Leo was stuck standing there, frozen in place as he stared at Ghost’s fallen body, Taylor had no such qualms about moving. Growling in triumph, she stepped forward, ripping out the rest of the man’s throat for good measure.

  “Coward,” she snarled again, flicking the blood from her claws all over his pristine outfit before standing up and turning toward Leo with concern in her eyes. “Are you okay?”

  “...What did you do?” Leo asked, finally managing to tear his eyes away from the dead man before them. There was no way Ghost should have been able to be killed so easily, even with his soul dampened. Yet somehow, where Leo and everyone else's attacks had phased through him harmlessly, Taylor’s had connected just fine.

  “I ripped out his throat,” Taylor shrugged, glancing down at Ghost and frowning once again. “He killed our friends. He was going to kill you. He had it coming.”

  “No, I’m not arguing with you about killing him. He was a monster who was going to kill thousands of people. But your claws… I don’t…” Leo growled in frustration, ripping off his gauntlets and rushing over to surprise Taylor by throwing his arms around her.

  “Leo?” she started, before he silenced her with a surprise kiss. After a few seconds, he finally pulled away.

  “Sorry. I don’t know how you just did what you did, but thank you. You saved us. I just wish…” Leo sighed, turning to gaze upon the bodies of their newfound friends. “...I wish we could have saved them too.”

  “If he hadn’t stopped us with that weird, invisible wall, I could have torn out his throat before he got to Willow and Ember,” Taylor growled, walking over to the two of them and crouching down. Laying a hand on Willow’s face, which still seemed to be frozen in terror, Taylor turned to him with a mixture of fire and sadness in her eyes. “Why did he have to go for them first? I could have killed him if he came for me!”

  “I don’t know. Maybe their ranged attacks were more dangerous to him than we originally thought,” Leo said, crouching down by Ghost and watching as the blood pouring from his ruined throat began to slow to a trickle. Along with three other, smaller gems of various colors and sizes, a single, pure-white gem larger than any Leo had ever seen before had already manifested atop Ghost’s chest. Picking it up, Leo turned it this way and that, trying to glean any information he could from it. “Taylor, could you check this out?”

  Nodding, she joined him by their downed adversary, bringing the gem close to her face and sniffing it. After a moment, she licked the gem, recoiling back as if her tongue had been shocked.

  “Bleh… it feels like almost raw power. Definitely Grade 20. Whatever the skill is, it has something to do with the soul.”

  “Something to do with the soul…” Leo repeated, staring at the gem as an idea began forming in his mind. “I think I might know what happened. Why you were able to harm him when the rest of us weren’t.”

  “What is it?” Taylor asked, placing the soul-based gem back down on Ghost’s chest. It seemed even she wasn’t confident in eating the gem, which meant it had to have a truly immense amount of power packed within.

  “He mentioned having amazing soul control, right? Maybe that gem allowed him to somehow merge his soul with his physical form, or something along those lines. It would explain how he was able to phase through everything, because the soul isn’t actually a solid thing.”

  “Okay. So why could I cut him?”

  “Your body is your soul,” Leo said, pointing at her blood-stained claws. The more he thought about it, the more confident he grew in his theory. “You’re some weird, never before seen hybrid between soul and flesh. We’ve already established you don’t work like the rest of us do. I mean, you eat magical beast gems, for crying out loud. If your soul extends throughout your entire body, that would include the tips of your claws as well. I guess a soul-on-soul attack worked just fine.”

  “Huh,” Taylor muttered, peering down at herself as she nodded. “Makes sense. Did you check his pockets yet?”

  “Not yet.” Ghost didn’t have any sort of pack on him, so Leo wasn’t expecting a whole lot. However, he did have a small, familiar box made out of polished white wood that Leo recognized instantly. “Another gem box!”

  Cracking it open, Leo revealed a crystalline, violet gem that was completely see through. Holding it out for Taylor, she sniffed at the gem.

  “Vision… the mind… I don’t know, this one is tricky. Grade 18.”

  “This has to be the Scrying skill,” Leo said, shutting the box quickly and slipping it into his pack. “He must have used that to actually find us. Shifting gems in and out of the soul isn’t easy, especially ones of such a high Grade. But I suppose if he was as good as he claimed at soul control, he could probably do it pretty fast.”

  Ghost didn’t have anything else interesting on him, not even so much as a single coin. Leo wished they knew where he’d been operating out of, but obviously, it wasn’t as though they could ask him anymore. After finishing their search, Leo stood up and offered Taylor a hand, peering over at the fallen trio as he steeled himself for something he really didn’t want to do.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “We should see what gems they had,” he finally said, doing his best to ignore how wrong it felt to take from their friends’ dead bodies. He figured it was probably what they would have wanted anyway, but still, it just didn’t seem right.

  He and Taylor went from one body to the next, collecting the various gems that had emerged from their souls upon death. A few of the weaker-Grade gems had already vanished, but there were still some left behind.

  “Banshee’s Wail, Grade 14. Something to do with fire, Grade 9. Something else to do with fire, Grade 11. A stamina or endurance skill, Grade 12. And a strength and vitality skill, Grade 9,” Taylor finished, going down the line of the five gems they’d collected from the fallen trio. Moving over to the other gems Ghost had held in his core beyond the soul-based one, she continued. “This one feels… almost hungry, in a way. Grade 13. And this one is speed, Grade 8. His other gem that already vanished was only Grade 3.”

  Even now, the other gems in the single digits were beginning to shine a bit and looked like the edges were flaking off into tiny particles that drifted through the air, revealing they didn’t have long before they disappeared as well.

  “Grades 20, 13, 8, and 3,” Leo muttered, shaking his head in awe. “That means Ghost had a soul rank of 44. At least. Even higher than my parents. If he hadn’t been so heavily dampened in order to access this plane…”

  “Then it’s a good thing he was,” Taylor said, cutting off that thought before he could continue.

  “Yeah… Well, no time to waste thinking,” Leo said, snatching up Steel’s strength-based skill and holding it against his chest. While another speed-based skill was tempting, it was pure strength he was after at the moment. “Sorry, Taylor, I need to incorporate this one into my soul before it vanishes. Would you mind keeping watch while I do?”

  “Of course,” she said, getting to her feet and beginning to pace around the clearing. With her watching over him, Leo withdrew into himself, focusing on the two gems nestled away within his core he would need to remove to fit this new one.

  Sorry, old friend, but I need all the space I can muster, Leo thought, easily plucking the Grade 2 Darkvision skill from his core and converting the gem into power. The power from the small gem was like a speck when laid upon his current soul layer, and he quickly moved onto the mildly trickier one. His Grade 7 Rage skill was definitely harder to remove from his core without damaging anything, but nowhere near all that complicated. It was only because he was moving fast that it was anything even resembling a struggle.

  Finally, after maneuvering the skill out of his core and converting it back into raw power, which he quickly made use of for his cultivation, Leo was ready for his newest skill. His now partially empty soul was quite desperate to be filled, and he grit his teeth as he carefully pulled Steel’s gem into himself, making sure to keep a hold on the skill’s structure all the while. Slipping the bits and pieces through the many layers of his soul, he let out a sigh of relief as he finally felt the skill take in his core and his soul was largely satisfied once more.

  Soul Rank: 17 (1 available)

  Physical Evolution (Dash): Increased speed and reflexes

  Beast Gem: Pebble Giant (9)

  Skill: Vigor+

  Beast Gem: Ogre (7)

  Skill: Minor Strength+

  Pleased with the fact that he’d retained his strength skill synergy, Leo opened his eyes, flexing a hand as he felt power and certainty flow through his body like never before. Vigor was a well-known skill, and one he’d always thought sounded interesting. Not only did it provide a solid strength boost, it also improved one’s durability and vitality as well. It would go a long way toward helping him keep up with how weirdly robust Taylor’s body was.

  The loss of Darkvision was a real blow, however. He’d be relying on Taylor a lot more during the nights in the foreseeable future until he managed to find a way to solve that problem.

  “Finished!” he called out, looking around at how the clearing had changed. While he’d been busy cultivating, it seemed Taylor had gone out of her way to bury their three friends, leaving only Ghost lying on the ground for the forest’s scavengers to take care of. Knowing he was something of a friend of his father’s, Leo wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that. Though all it took was a moment of remembering what the man had just done to his new friends to make him suddenly okay with the idea.

  “Here,” Taylor said, walking over and handing him the black gem box that currently held the Grade 8 durability skill he’d been holding onto. From the way she talked, it was obvious she was in the middle of sucking on a gem to take its skill into her core. “I swapped out the defensive skill you were thinking about using for your next evolution for the Grade 20 gem we got from Ghost’s body. I figured it would be more useful.”

  “Good call, I should have done that before I started cultivating,” Leo nodded, glad Taylor had had the thought. “Are you taking one of the new skills for yourself?”

  “Yep. It felt like my soul had just enough space after eating the Banshee’s Wail gem, so I’m swapping out the camouflage spider’s Injection Bite with whatever speed gem Ghost had been holding onto. I don’t like that you’re faster than I am.”

  “You couldn’t let me have one thing I was better at than you?” Leo asked, chuckling despite everything that had just happened. Combined with her Natural Weapons skill, that meant Taylor was officially up to a soul rank of 18, maintaining her slight lead on him even now.

  “Nope,” she said, helping him up and throwing one final, painful look over at the makeshift graves she’d dug. “I wasn’t sure if it was what they’d wanted… But I didn’t want to just leave them lying there.”

  “You did fine,” he said, pulling her into a quick hug. Feeling her body pressed against him as she hugged him back, Leo spent one glorious moment not worrying about the fate of the planarverse, before he allowed the weight of all he still had to do rest upon his shoulders once more.

  “Okay,” he said, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “Ghost probably wasn’t operating alone. None of his skills would have allowed him to tunnel down into this plane’s core and cause it to collapse. That means everyone is still in grave danger, and this plane could collapse at any moment. We need to warn the newcomers not to enter the plane, and ideally stop the Planar Lords’ agents who remain from digging through that last bit that remains before the core. Are you ready?”

  “To save the world, kill more bad people, and take their gems for ourselves?” Taylor asked, giving him a feral grin. “Always!”

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