I tried to scramble back into the tunnel, but I was too big to do it with any speed; the lemure blocking the way wasn’t helping either. And Second of the Snow reached out towards me, but I had one of my minions, a lion with a mane of fire, attack the hand. Suprising Second, so they swatted away the creature, the force sending it flying, smashing it hard into the wall above the tunnel, creating a crater.

  The crater creating cracks wich traveled down towards my tunnel, the earthen walls shaking around me, then crumbling. My head was still outside the tunnel, so I was still alive when my entire body was reduced to a pile of chitin and green goo.

  “Warning, HP is in the Red.”

  The pain was blinding, but I knew I wasn’t going to last long like this, so I summoned one of the few creatures I constantly kept in Slip Away. A dozen Solar Scale Butterflies surrounding me and immediately blasting me with their healing light. The magic just barely balancing out my rapid loss of HP, so it wouldn’t fall any further. But when that concern was dealt with, I still had two big problems actively ready to kill me.

  I watched as Second reached out for me once again, brushing aside the rubble that had crushed me. I prepared my nearby minions. None of them were strong enough to give a proper fight against these two, but they would be good enough diversions.

  Then Second picked me up, and Urg surrounded me with water that was tinged a light teal, and I was prepared to attack. Until I realised that my HP was going up again, and the water was making me feel warm and tingly, like a limb waking up, except pleasant.

  “What?” I said.

  Then, Second did a pulling motion, the gesture we had agreed on to mean ‘Give me Moon Silk’. But my abdomen was still non existent at the moment, so we had to wait a moment before I could comply.

  And the first thing Second said was, “Are you ok?”

  I looked at them, confused, “Yeah, feeling better than when I was mostly a puddle of goo.”

  “That is good,” Urg swam around me, “But I must ask, why did you attack us; Question?”

  I took a moment before answering, “Well, waking up to your room being flooded when one of your allies is a water manipulator. And that ally has a life or death condition that can easily be solved by killing me, and the next time I see them, they have a giant ape with all their weapons drawn and a giant wall of water ready to crush me. Well, I hope you can see how that would make me a little more conducive to attacking you on sight.”

  “Indeed; Agreement. And I must confess that the flooding is my fault; Apology. I had enacted a plan that did not go as intended; Apology.”

  “What could’ve possibly happened for you to accidentally flood miles of tunnels?”

  Urg Floaw swam around in their bubble of water aggressively, hesitating.

  And Impaciantly Second took the lead, “A river, we were diverting it to create an artificial pond for Urg to use in the fight. But the walls of the mote we had built eroded and flooded the tunnels, we were able to stop it, but not in time to prevent the worst of the damage. And to answer why I had my weapon out earlier, it was because of the ants that were attacking us for some reason.”

  Urg slumped, “Yes; Apology. It was all my fault; Apology. I hope you can forgive me; Apology.”

  “Ok… but how did you find me? It seems rather convenient that you found me the instant I came out of the water.”

  “We followed your minions,” Second answered, “Unlike the ants, most of your other minions had gone completely still until a few hours ago. And we noticed some of them were gathering together and going into the tunnels. We believed them to be under your command, so we followed, protecting them from the ants that had gone rogue.”

  I hesitated a moment before saying, “I should probably clarify this, the ants aren’t my minions, their Queen is. And her control over her minions isn’t as absolute or far reaching as mine is, so I hope you won’t kill them. Because if they think you’re their enemy, there’s very little I can do. I'd recommend avoiding them all together for a while until their death pheremones wear off of you.”

  “Oh, thank you for the information.”

  The conversation slowed down after that, Urg Floaw profusely apologising to me the entire time while healing me. And when my body was mostly a body again, we made the trip back to the surface, the wall of water Urg was holding back crashed, making the earth shake. Startling me, but despite that, this climb was much more enjoyable.

  And when I let my domain sense fade, the first thing Bug Jacob said to me being, “Ha, told you so about Urg.”

  I let out a mental sigh, “One day I’m going to kill you, and I’ll only cry because nobody else will know.”

  “Another zinger stolen from your brother.”

  “Did I steal that one from him?”

  “I think so… the first memory of it is so old I can barely make anything out. My point still stands, though.”

  The bickering brought me a strange sense of peace as we ascended out of the tunnels, but all of that peace was wiped out when we reached the surface. Half of the battle field having been submerged under water, the other half having been affected by a flash flood. The top layer of soil washed away, and random rocks that hadn’t been there before now placed haphazardly.

  “The hell,” I exclaimed.

  “Sorry; Apologies.”

  I groomed my antenna, “Well, at least we can still work with this.”

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “Really; Apology. I mean; Question?”

  “Nothings unsalvageable.”

  “So how are we going to fix this?” Second asked.

  “We’re not going to fix it, we’re going to work with it. It’ll take more time and effort to change it back than to come up with something new.”

  And so we got to planning. I got a whole new repertoire of minions meant for water, which wasn’t as drastic a shift as it could’ve been since my minions were in the tunnels that got flooded, thankfully my elites had survived.

  Wait, why was I even doing this? I was just going to betray them. Well, doing nothing would be pretty suspicious, plus the preparations would help protect me when the time came.

  OOO

  After the sun set, Second and Urg made dinner for themself, while I practised Slip Away above the new lake, trying to level it up. Taking schools of fish in and out as fast as I could, a minuscule amount of MP and EP being sapped away each time. After I had mutated, I checked to see my evolution, but there had been none. My guess as to why was that I hadn’t gotten my core Skills to their max levels yet, since that was one of the requirements every time I had evolved in the past.

  And so, I had been grinding away, taking more time to communicate with the other contestants with Moon Silk, taking in as many minions as I could with Lunar Scale Dust, and torturing the fish with Slip Away. And the Efforts were paying off somewhat, I had gotten a level in Lunar Scale Dust, and I was working towards my second in Slip Away. Then, with a ding, I hit it.

  “Level up, +1 LV to Slip Away. 8/10”

  With that, I had reached eight levels in all my un-maxed Core Skills, the evenness scratching an itch in the back of my mind. I thought over what I should do next. If I kept up three levels per day, then I should get to evolve in two days, with a day to spare, even with the needed 24 hours to evolve. Though I doubted that I would be able to because of the exponential amount of XP needed to level something. And I had already run into a bottleneck with Lunar Scale Dust since it seemed to gain XP based on how hard something was to subjugate, rather than the amount. And I couldn’t really find any strong monsters since I had already taken or killed the strong ones within a reasonable distance.

  But then I was broken out of my thoughts heard a call from the camp Second and Urg had set up, breaking me out of my thoughts. When I looked over, I saw them gesturing for me, so I went over to them and gave them a strand of silk.

  “What is it?” I asked them.

  “Rest,” Second replied.

  “I can still do stuff, I don’t really get physically tired. Plus, all ‘my’ construction is done by my minions.”

  “That may be true, but you’re going to burn yourself out going like this.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Urg swam over to me, “You’ve been getting worse at that teleportation you do with the fish; statement.”

  “What?”

  “There’s more and more time in between each one, and you were getting distracted more at the end of your practice session. All clear signs of getting tired, and when you practice tired, you’ll only do the thing badly, which will give you no ground for improvement.”

  “But, I would be giving up so much time to do stuff.”

  “I’m not saying to give up eight entire hours; Agreement. I see the upsides of not needing to sleep. What I am saying is for you to give yourself some time for your brain to reset. Thirty, ten, even five minutes would help.”

  I grumbled and shifted around, and eventually I acquiesced. “Fine.”

  “Great.”

  Then, Second of the Snow pushed a suspiciously pre planned pile of leaves towards me, and I reluctantly took them. The taste buds on my feet telling me they were fine to eat, then I chewed on them.

  “You know,” Second said, drinking out of a cup roughly fashioned from a hollowed out log, “Back in my home, there were these giant trees called the gods' blessing, and their trunks were the size of a small sea. Some of the bigger ones even breached the atmosphere, and they had a symbiosis with this type of fungi that connected it to every plant around it.”

  “Damn,” I replied, “I ain’t got anything that cool back on my planet.”

  “Come on, you’ve gotta have something,” they egged on.

  I finished chewing my leaf before replying, despite not speaking with a physical mouth, “Well, my world's people have gone to the moon.”

  “The moon?” Urg scrunched the brow on both of their heads, then pointed upwards at the sky, “That kinda moon?”

  “Yep.”

  They looked at me in awe, “How?”

  “Rockets, but beyond that, I know nothing.”

  Second looked devastated at the news, “How would you know nothing? It’s such a magnificent thing!”

  “It’s a lot of complex science, the beginning of which is only taught at higher levels of education.”

  Second slumped their shoulders, and the conversation seemed to take a dip, but it was saved by Urg, “My planet doesn’t have a moon at all, only a set of rings.”

  “Hmm, one of the planets from my solar system, called Jupiter, has a set of rings as well.”

  “Jupiter, peculiar name, how did it come to be?”

  “Some old civilisation called Rome had an important god named that, and people were obsessed with them for hundreds of years, still are for some reason. I don’t really know the rest of the story, but my best guess is that a couple hundred years ago, some scientist found it and named it that because it’s the biggest in our solar system.”

  “Hundreds of years ago; Question? My planet's scientists were only able to discover there were other planets less than a century ago, because of the lava ocean emissions, making it nearly impossible to see through the atmosphere without powerful equipment.”

  “Ocean,” Second said, “I do not know that word.”

  “An ocean is a large body of liquid,” Urg answered.

  “Like a sea?”

  “Yes, but much bigger. For example, the biggest ocean on my planet that takes up 20% of my planet's surface, in total, my entire planet's surface is 50% lava.”

  “My planet has oceans too,” I interjected, “But they’re mostly water, and they take up, like, two thirds of my planet's surface.”

  “Wow,” Second exclaimed, “My planet has barely any water compared to you. The only large bodies of water are underground.”

  I ate another leaf, “Hmm, really, I never got to see that.”

  They both turned towards me, “How would you have seen that at all; Question?”

  “Well, I fought Fifth of the Mist, I saw his memories and stuff.”

  Urg tilted their head, “I thought they could only see the memories of the subject, not the other way around.”

  “Well, I found a way to reverse it, and we sorta… well, it’s how I killed him.”

  After that, I felt a drop of energy and mostly stayed out of the conversation, mostly saying ‘yeah’ and ‘uh huh’ while I waited for them to go to sleep. When they did, I got right back to work, and like how Urg said, the break had done me well. I was doing things faster and with much more efficiency. But then I encountered a problem, a multitude of them.