Travel and experimentation

Over the course of the next week, Beasty and Krage got closer, due to Krage being unable to travel around the ship without risking being caught he spent most of his time in the anchor room, stepping out every once and a while to snatch food or water from the crew bunks or pantry

They ate and slept together most days with him often ending up being placed in Beasty's lap, a habit beasty had picked up, as she used him as a source of comfort throughout the journey and nights. Beasty suffered from what appeared to be vicious nightmares so he often woke up to the sound of her crying and snarling in the dark most nights.

To pass the time, he taught Beasty a game he had observed some children in the sea market playing, one called mace, spear and sword. Mace broke sword, spear outreached hammer and sword cut spear. Each was represented by a hand sign that would be shown on the count of three

The scores between them were presently 210-209 in his favor, but this was mainly because he let Beasty win (she always used hammer) as she cried easily. Something he always had to keep in mind, to both not hurt her feelings and avoid being electrocuted when she inevitably lost control of her mana, which generated electricity unconsciously

Beasty had tried to teach him a few games called i-spy and hide and seek but both were kind of redundant as they lived in an empty room

On the positive side however due to the growing closeness between them and the growing level of protectiveness being demonstrated by beasty who had begun to attack any crew member who dared to come near the anchor room, something she didn't do before, due to them giving her food But since they barely fed her nowadays and he was her friend, it was clear who she liked better.

As a matter of fact, she had become increasingly hesitant to even let him leave the room to get food and water, getting too afraid of losing him to the crew. She had also tried dulling her claws against the room walls, something he had stopped her from doing after she accidentally scratched him during a nightmare. she had reflexively taken swipe at him when he tried to wake her from a particularly bad dream and upon waking up and realizing what she had done she had started sobbing so hard that a crew member had tried to enter the room, just to shut her up

Thankfully he hadn't seen the one-handed boy in the cell or Beasty would have torn him to pieces…but he was now missing a leg

Speaking of his one arm, after beasty had finally taken notice of it, or the lack of it, two whole days after meeting him, she had suddenly become far more attentive than he had thought possible. Sure, she was far from uncaring but he hadn't expected her to suddenly begin lifting everything for him and literally start trying to feed him at a time like a baby, which despite it being slightly demeaning he allowed at times as she seemed to enjoy it

However outside of his growing friendship with beasty Krage was finding himself unable to accomplish much, he was unable to leave the lower decks and as such had not been able to discover the boat's destination. And he had been able to contact Alice, the original message that he had carved into the floor of her cell had been burnt away during her fiery outburst and she was now under constant guard and key.

And so he had begun to focus on something else entirely… magic

See while before, in his original body his body had demonstrated no signs of the same glow he had found in Alice, except in those final moments in which it had been destroyed, the body he was now inhabiting excluded a slight glow, extremely small, but there. If you were to compare his own mana to that of Alice or Beasty who seemed to possess abnormal amounts of mana it would be like comparing a candle to a wildfire

But that did not deter him

However… There was one strange thing of note, his mana, whenever he tried to stimulate or manipulate it, acted erratically. From what he had seen with Alice and beasty, mana when used flowed seamlessly into a force or spell, even subconsciously as it did with beasty. But his? It seemed to twist and warp whenever touched, changing from a slight white hue to a dark purple.

Beginning his experimentation, Krage began to cut open a large rat that Beasty had killed for him, using one of the claws on his hand to create an incision in the skin. Once the cut was deep enough and had reached to the bone, he placed another finger against the wound and began to push his mana through it. manipulating the mana itself was far harder than he had expected, it seemed to fight him the entire time as if he were pushing against the flow of the wind, trying to catch it

And while it took him some time to get it to move he eventually managed to force it through him and into the rat, attempting to cast the same minor heal that he and Alice had experimented with all those days ago.

But it didn't work, it had a far different effect.

Instead of healing the rat as he had intended and making the incision close, the mana seeped into the specimen, past the wound, and into the bone itself. And soon after a moment, the rat began to tremble and shake, as if it had become alive and then-

SHLICK

White spears of bone slammed out of the rat, impaling its dead body from the inside in all directions at once, looking as if someone had shoved dozens of needles into it at once. And as the mana continued to seep into the rat the bones grew and grew, ten centimeters, 30, 1 meter long! In all directions!

And if it weren't for Beasty who pulled Krage away from the explosion of bone, he may have been impaled through his own magic

"That was… surprising" he muttered from behind Beasty's arms