Training
From the village, I walked to the nearest city, a port city named Innsport with a large adventuring hub. Along the way, I stole a kerchief off a clothes line, and some large tinted goggles from a blacksmith shop to hide my face, lest I be mistaken for a monster of some kind. Although,, with my pointed teeth and mottled skin, I wasn't sure I wasn't a monster at this point.
Once in town, I went straight for the hub. I registered under a fake name, telling the clerk I was in an accident, which is why I couldn't show my face. She rolled her eyes, and told me that it was my funeral, and marked me down. I was in the hub, and could sign up for some jobs, but looking at them they all seemed to be the type of thing me and Mill had been doing for years, just with gold for payment instead of food scraps. I needed to get an actual license to fight, and to do so, I needed to go prove myself to the head trainer.
The tests he put me through were designed for someone with at least a foot and a half on me, but I managed to get through them without too much trouble. The strength tests were the most difficult, even with my newfound ability to use the worms to help me physically, but despite only being able to lift the second lightest stone, my scores in the agility and dexterity sections made sure I passed overall. I got my Class 1 adventuring license that same day, and the next day, I took my first real job.
It was a simple one, kill a pack of wolves that had been stalking the sheep around the town, and I had a group of 5 other people helping me. It went quickly, and I used my sword like it was a part of me. I felt the worms gush through my arms as I swung, and felt them snap forward as I lunged, springing me forward. I wasn't the most skilled or the best fighter in the group, but I wasn't the worst, and for someone who had always let their partner fight for them, I was very proud of my success. I swore I could feel a glow of pride from the pendant around my neck as I got my paycheck for the job.
I wanted to train myself up as an assassin though, someone who could break into someone's house and get away unseen so I could get to the prince again, but those jobs were few and far between, so my 'training' mostly consisted of exploring old ruins, killing thieves, and helping other adventurers with missions. After a while, I became fairly well known in the community, not famous, but known for being able to take a beating and still get up again. It was a lonely time, as I had to pretend to be an adult, and an aloof and distant one at that, and as a result, I had no friends to speak of.
One day, a few months after I started and just after receiving my Class 3, me and a crew of adventurers were ambushed by a group of marauders we had been hunting, and one of them managed to split my head with an axe. Through the fuzziness, I managed to pull the axe out and kill the attacker, but one of the other adventurers had seen, and once I healed up in a few minutes, he knew something was different about me. Over the course of a few weeks, I became infamous, and rumors of me being a golem, an undead, or a goddess were spreading quickly.
Innsport was becoming too crowded after that, so I bid farewell to the few acquaintances I had at the time, gathered my belongings, and headed across the ocean to the town of Alagara, where many more jobs were available. It was a bustling city, and I felt much much closer to the prince here, but I couldn't pinpoint his position just yet. I spent time building a reputation as I did before, and eventually I made class 5, and was lucky enough to be getting assassin jobs almost every week. My specialty was using a potion to become small, breaking into the house, then drinking the antidote in the target's bedroom and killing them with a poisoned knife while they slept, I had never been caught, and no one knew how I was getting in. The potions I used were almost exclusively used for hunting large game and incredibly painful to take, so no one else thought of using them on yourself.
Unfortunately, rumors of an immortal adventurer were making their way across the sea too, and while no one here knew I was the one the rumors were concerning, my reputation as a hard to kill assassin were very close to those of an impossible to kill man hunter, and any hint at my identity could lead the prince to fleeing further still, making him even harder to find.
I began prepping for the kill, I still couldn't pinpoint him, but I was pretty sure he was in the city somewhere, so I bought sleeping drought, the strongest poisons I could afford, embalming fluid, potions with all sorts of horrible effects, and the best gear for stealthing I could find. I crawled the city, trying to find where the pulsing mass was calling to me from, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere around me at once. Frustrated, I threw myself into my work, killing mob bosses, corrupt politicians, and high ranking nobles on request, trying to scare out the prince from whatever hiding spot he was sequestering himself away in.
In a way, it worked. After getting to a reputation as the best killer available for hire in the city roughly a year after moving there, I got a letter delivered to my room. It wasn't too unusual, most of my clients preferred to keep their requests off the official board, so I loaded up with my usual gear and headed out to meet the client for more details. They met me in a stone warehouse, fully empty except for a single chair in the center where they sat. Upon arriving, I saw they had a similar fashion sense as I did, mask covering their face, cloak around their body, eyes covered up with tinted glass. They looked me up and down, and nodded, then spoke.
"I have a bit of a problem. I need someone killed, someone very important, but you see- they are quite hard to kill. I speak of course of the 'unkillable goddess' that the people of Innsport keep going on about. You see, I don't think she is unkillable, at least not fully, and you seem to be quite the dangerous person yourself, so if anyone can kill her, it would be you. She is susceptible to fire, sleeping powder, and embalming fluid, so if you can somehow use those, you should be able to kill her without issue, the embalming fluid is key though, you'll need quite a lot of it! I recommend putting her to sleep, then using the embalming fluid to stop her immortality, then using fire-"
As the man in front of me prattled on in that oh so familiar way, my blood chilled. He was here, standing in front of me, the prince. I thought through what I had on my person. No sleeping drought, no embalming fluid, no poison strong enough to keep him down for more than a few minutes, I was fully unprepared. As I silently listened to him describe me to me and tell me how to find 'her', I thought through my options. I could try and beat him in a battle of attrition, but that could take days. I could try and use the poison and keep using it until I got him home, but that could cause a scene, and he was much to heavy to drag kicking and vomiting through the streets.
Then it clicked. I slid my hand into my cloak, and grasped the bottle , unhooking it and slipping it to the rat. I still couldn't force the rat to do what I wanted, but I could direct him a bit better. As the prince finished up, I nodded, and stepped forward, extending my hand, offering a handshake for the deal. The prince looked at it like a moldy loaf of bread, but sighing he rose and stepped forward to take it.
As soon as our hands touched, I spun, kicking his legs out from under him and throwing my elbow into his throat, tackling him to the ground, his skull bouncing on the stone ground twice. He screeched, and tried to call out for help, but I twisted my elbow in deeper and choked out his cries. Using my free hand, I prized open his mouth, and the rat crawled over his face, and poured the bottle in. He coughed and gasped, but I held firm clamping my hand over his mouth and nose until I saw his throat bob. At that, I pushed off him, and watched in pleasure as he tried to gag himself to vomit up the potion.
His body twisted and pulled, his limbs folding inwards, pulling inside his clothes. The sound of flesh popping and tearing filled the room and his moans got smaller and smaller as he floundered, and I counted the seconds until the potion would be complete. Once it was done, I reached into his clothes, and pulled him out. His body small and helpless in my hand, he screamed at the sight of me, and I squeezed, feeling organs pop and bones snap. He went limp, his body healing slowly in my hand. It was an odd feeling, a nice one, the organs sliding around and popping into place under my fingers, feeling the worms call to me loudly now that our skin was touching. I stood, the rat running up my body to hide in my cloak, and headed home, squeezing and twisting the tiny prince the whole way there.
~
I wanted to get my worms back into me. I needed them in me. I needed to be whole. The only question was how? I could eat him, that seemed to work for the limbs, but if he was too small, I may just destroy the mass in my stomach. I thought about just keeping him as a pet, like the rat, but even at his tiny size I couldn't influence his actions or thoughts at all, so the escape risk was far too high.
I looked at his body pinned spread eagle on my desk, the needles holding him down still dangling thread from the holes and I laughed. All the time I spend under his knife, all the people that died for him, the almost hundred years of pain and torture he inflicted on hundreds of his own civilians, all summed up on my desk in a package the size of a dagger hilt. I stuck him in the gut with my knife again and listened to him scream. I could barely hear him, his insignificant voice got lost in my room before reaching me sitting just a foot away.
I twisted the knife a bit, watching him cringe. I didn't want him to get off this easy. Killing Mill, torturing me for almost a year, his life of crimes, he needed to really suffer. He needed to suffer forever, and I couldn't rely on the gods to do it for me. I sighed, and began to undress. There was only one way to make sure I had my worms back and that he would be punished forever, he needed to stay alive, with my worms, inside me.
I grit my teeth and hissed in pain as I split my stomach open with the knife, just under my ribcage, and willed the worms to stop the bleeding but not heal, and cut into my diaphragm feeling the familiar chill on my lungs as I did. The mass was up just a bit higher, just in front of the bottom of my wind pipe. Twisting my arm, I slid the knife up further, and slit the space between my air tube and the mass. I reached down with my other hand, and picked up the prince. He had figured out what was going to happen, and twisted against me as I drug him up the needles, pulling him free with a slight pop.
I slowly forced him inside the wound, feeling his fear and terror spike as he entered the dark, bloody cavity. I slid him up and up, almost to the heart, and pushed him into the hole between the mass and my windpipe. As I slid my hand out of my chest cavity, the worms began sealing everything up, finding their long lost siblings and plunging into his body, ripping holes in him to get to the tiny mass of worms in his chest. I felt his body twist and snap, I felt the worms reconnect, and I felt myself become that much more whole.
As my cut sealed up, I took a deep breath, feeling the flexing of my chest and lungs snap his ribs and limbs, and exhaled, feeling the air being crushed out of him. He struggled to breathe, to move, to see, the worms chewing away at his ever regenerating body, his senses drowned out by the smell of my breath, the sound of my heart, the heat of my body. He screamed. I could feel it through the worms, but I couldn't hear a thing. The room was blissfully silent in his endless torment. I stood up and picked Mill's holy symbol up off the desk and kissed it gently.
"It's ok, Mill, I finally got him... Thanks for staying with me all this time, I hope you're proud of me. Even if we we might not see each other in heaven... I'm glad to have you by my side for now"
I felt the breeze from the open window, and heard the toll of the church bells ring in the air signifying morning at last. I looked at the bell tower in the distance, and then back down at the holy symbol.
"Mill, tomorrow is a holy day, if you'd come with me, I think it's about time I start going back to church..."
The breeze picked up a bit just then, and for all the world sounded like a rough, wry laugh as it played through my window and into the early morning air.