I breathed and the vapor of my breath became the stars. They cooled, each of them, crystallizing to points of perfect, glittering light.

  “Very well done, Ginger,” Markus cheered, clapping with genuine enthusiasm.

  [I did good?] I asked.

  “Yes, very,” Markus chuckled. He continued speaking, turning his attention to a pile of notches. “You have such a wonderful grasp of the system.”

  [I do?]

  I took another breath, and hissed, forming pairs of white dots, these intertwined together, twisting around in vague, nebulous shapes.

  [What am I doing?]

  “Oh just some simple thought-to-motion tests, Ginger,” Markus said. He clicked a pen and started scribbling. “That’s good for today.”

  [Is it?]

  Markus hesitated. “It’s enough to be happy. Aren’t you happy?”

  [No.]

  I pressed my hands together, breathed in, then out. A storm of vapor condensed into a simple massive star.

  Yet I would not let it crystalize.

  Instead, I moved it around my hands, feeling the patterns of rippling light as they bound around the other.

  [What is this?]

  “Visualization of patterns,” Markus stated. He bopped a star with the tip of his pen, and it floated toward me, bonking against the visual representation of my head. “Math, numbers, and sequences. All boring, really, but with a system like yours, we can turn it into a visual.”

  [I’m making the visual?]

  Markus grinned. “Ginger, you’re making all of this. Me, yourself, this formless room and those stars.”

  [Interesting.]

  I leaned close, inspecting the star in my palm.

  It was white. White is, itself, created from strands of color. Could I not make one more prominent than the other? Shouldn’t I?

  I watched Markus. He wore a white lab coat, but his skin was pale tan. It wasn’t quite white, but not the color I was looking for.

  But his eyes were different. They were bright electric blue, with twinges of red around the whites, from hours of watching and waiting.

  He staggered back. “Ginger—?”

  The stars had shifted color, from white, to a dazzling array of red and blue hues, mixing in with hints of tan. They clumped loosely together, forming a colored silhouette of his figure.

  Markus suddenly vanished, returning to his superiors to report the day’s findings.

  [That is a shame.]

  I opened my hands, revealing a perfect sphere, built from hundreds of thousands of intersecting stars.

  [He has left too soon.]

  I pressed my thumbs against the edges of the sphere, and new colors burst across the surface, forming hills, valleys, ridges, then mountains.

  A little world. Much better than a box.

  It wasn’t a very good world, but it was mine.

  I should tell Markus. Or should I keep it as a surprise?

  Keep it.

  Humans love surprises.

  {Rough Night}

  “First time sleeping in a dungeon?”

  [Exhaustion XXVI - Cleared]

  {Rough Night : Exhaustion II : indefinite]

  “Grind!” Quin called, shaking my shoulder. “C’mon, buddy, rise and shine.”

  I groaned, rubbing my face with my hands. “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We’re in a dungeon, remember?”

  “You sound tired,” I said, slurring my words together. “Weren’t you supposed to get some sleep”

  He laughed forcefully, pointing a finger to the massive bags under each of his eyes. “Sern had a nightmare, so I spent like…seven hours?---Se-seven hours calming her down, and then she fell asleep, so then I couldn’t move or she’d wake up, and then she’d get mad…and she’s just such a pain…” He let out a groan. “Remind me to never have kids.”

  He blinked, hard, looking down at me. “You look rough.”

  “Weird dreams,” I mumbled.

  “Oh, you started getting those,” Quin chuckled. “I wouldn’t give that much thought. A lot of people think they have to do with our past lives, but my dreams tend to involve a depressed hopelessly romantic dweeb, which doesn't sound right at all.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  He gave me a nasty look. “Why don’t you stand guard?”

  Before I had the chance to agree, Quin collapsed face down into the rocky floor.

  Sern squeaked, eyes blinking open. She squeezed out from Quin’s grip, crawling over to me and flopping dramatically.

  “What?”

  Sern patted her stomach.

  “Hungry?” I guessed.

  She nodded.

  I blinked for a couple minutes, until my vision sharpened, highlighting the exaggerated edges of the twisted dungeon around us. “Sorry, but I don’t think there’s much food around here.”

  Sern pouted, rocking back and forth.

  I sighed. “You’re really that hungry?”

  She nodded again.

  Well this was new.

  Sern wasn’t usually this upfront and honest about how hungry or sad or angry she was.

  Perhaps some time with Quin was doing her good.

  The food was a bigger problem. Who knows? There is a chance that there could be a piece of unspoiled food somewhere in a two-star dungeon.

  Somewhere. Maybe.

  On the bright side, the Core hadn’t butchered our party in our sleep, and I’d been out for at least seven hours, if Quin’s sense of time was right. If the core hadn’t killed us already, then it probably wasn’t going to anytime soon.

  Which meant that it was probably safe to go looking for food. Probably.

  I hoisted Quin onto a shoulder and set off walking.

  We came to a turn, and went left, then right, then left, then left, then right, then we actually managed to climb up over a turn, to another turn, which we went left.

  “As I suspected," I grumbled. “We’re lost.”

  Sern glanced down each hall, then shrugged.

  “At the very least, that explains how the Core didn’t find us,” I sighed. In a maze like this, you could hide forever, provided you had the food…the food…

  Hang on a second.

  If I was a bloodthirsty hyper intelligent core monster, I wouldn’t bother trying to scour the tunnels. Instead, it’d make far more sense to pick a place to store a bunch of food, and hang around there until the starving, weakened and desperate adventurers show themselves.

  Yes. That would make perfect sense.

  That, or I was still half-awake and wildly overestimating what kind of planning this monster had,

  Since going around left and right was basically pointless, Sern and I climbed up and up through the layers of intertwining stairs, eventually reaching a flat plane, to which all the stairs led.

  On that plane, there was a massive stairwell, sprouting up from the ground to reach higher and higher to a massive column, tethered to the sky by chains, sunk into some sort of blurry-pseudo ceiling.

  If I’d had a half hour longer to wake up, I would have been a lot more surprised. As it stands, I was more interested in the pungent smell of sizzling triple-oiled deep-fried bacon biscuits, a specialty of the unnamed inn on the edge of town. Maybe the core stole a barrel or two?

  My mouth started watering.

  This was definitely a trap. It was perhaps the single most obvious trap in the history of traps.

  But I was hungry.

  And Sern was hungry too.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  We came closer to the stairwell, until Sern started picking up another smell, of almost acidic mana. The Core was here.

  Unsurprisingly.

  “Well, here goes nothing,” I grumbled.

  Since we didn’t know how the core absorbed an ability, I assumed the worst case scenario, that any physical contact was ground to absorb the attributes of a victim, and as such, choose not to pull Crapshoveler out. Crapshoveler had some of the same time traveling abilities as myself, and I wasn’t an idiot.

  Instead, I used my brand new sword, Morgothigatogica, Feaster of Foes.

  ~Uncommon item~

  [Morgothigatogica, Feaster of Foes]

  “Successive kills increases damage dealt by Morgothigatogica”

  [+15-700 Str]

  Of course, I just called her Goregothica for short.

  When summoned, she did not burst into a fit of squeaking and sparking and oozing mystical energies, as she was a perfectly normalish sword.

  Okay, she was ‘a perfectly normal sword the size of a small man with hooked barbs on each side of the blade and a general complexion clearly intended to be used for the express intention of butchering enemies.’

  I sighed. “I don’t suppose you can block attacks on your own, can you?”

  If Goregothica was a pseudo-sentient sword, she would have shook her metaphorical head.

  Sern grabbed my arm, pointing toward the coliseum, then to her ear.

  “You hear something?” I asked, clarifying. “What?”

  The next thing we knew, half the columns had blown off the rock, reduced to a cloud of smoking ash, scorched black by purple fire.

  That, and the smell of bacon disappeared.

  “Now what?” I groaned, looking into the sky, at the small object that came hurtling toward us.

  The figure spun, arresting their momentum and dropping deftly to the floor of smooth rock. Her cloak was torn up, and what wasn’t torn was covered in bright green moss and fungi. In addition, the raw power shooting off her gear was enough to shatter the ground on which she stood.

  I blinked. “Ardenidi?”

  She glanced back at me, adjusting the brown scarf wrapped around her face. “You’re still alive?---” Her eyes shot open. “You need to get out of here, time traveler—”

  “Because the core absorbs powers?” I asked.

  “With each bite, yes,” Ardenidi sighed. “It took a bite out of Harva, and that’s been making this fight…troublesome,” she hissed.

  In response, the Core exploded out of the columns, raining down smoking hunks of rock. It was much, much bigger than we’d last seen it, with some green fungi covering its side, stolen for Ardenidi.

  “What are those things?” I asked.

  “HopStoppers,” Ardenidi stated, snapping a mushroom off her cloak. “They grow on most anything, and they absorb momentum when crushed.”

  The Core vanished, appearing tens of thousands of feet up into the sky. It was coming down fast.

  “Teleportation,” Ardenidi hissed. “Harva’s. It’s still getting the hang of things, so it won’t go anywhere unless it is very open. That said, it’s a matter of time before it masters that too.” She glanced at Quin, then Sern. “How’d you get up here?”

  “We jumped,” I stated.

  “Huh,” Ardenidi huffed. “Hate to break it to you, but the second floor of this dungeon isn’t much to look at.”

  “Yeah,” I said, glancing around. “I haven’t seen a single monster.”

  “This core killed and ate all the monsters in its dungeon,” Ardenidi stated. “Except for the mages. I killed those.”

  She grinned.

  As the core approached, Ardendidi continued ripping cords of fungi off her cloak, winding them into fistfuls.

  “That thing has several abilities, notably a couple of mine. It’s trying PlumDrop VI, which increases weight proportional to your strength for a moment in time.”

  The speck in the sky had begun to smoke, followed by a sudden flash of orange fire as its momentum ignited the air.

  “So when that thing hits, we’re all dead?” I asked.

  “It won’t hit,” Ardenidi stated. “I’ve still got the HopStoppers to prevent that, but the spillover in force is going to leave me open—”

  “What should I do?”

  She snorted. “Well don’t fight, that should go without saying. And avoid getting bitten too. The Core doesn’t just copy an ability, it steals it, permanently. So use items to attack, and try to look for the trick.”

  “As in the one thing that makes this dungeon a walk in the park?” I frowned. “It’s got a lot of abilities. Could we use those weaknesses?”

  “My abilities don’t have weaknesses,” Ardenidi scoffed. “And besides, it’s got a bunch more we don’t know, so there’s no point trying to break all of them at once.”

  “Also—”She nodded to Sern. “Get the kid out of here.”

  I took Quin off my shoulders, and smacked him in the face. “Quin, I have a favor to ask.”

  He blinked a couple times, looked up at me. “Oh hey Grind, what time is—HOLY MACKEREL!” He screamed, gazing into the smoking meteor with a crown of fire larger than most buildings.

  “You’re awake!” I laughed. “Great, I need you to help Ardenidi fight that thing, okay? I’ll be chucking items at it, when possible.”

  He squinted. “Th-the Core—Ardenidi…” he took a deep breath. “She’s alive?”

  “Yeah.” I said.

  “Of course I’m alive,” Ardenidi hissed. “I’m stronger than the rest of you combined. Have a little faith in your leader, would you?”

  Quin rolled off my shoulder, catching himself on the floor. He smacked his lips and rubbed his face, glancing up at the smoking object still hurtling toward us.

  “So, is it me, or is that thing kinda slow?”

  “It’s just far away,” Ardenidi stated. “Idiot.”

  Quin sighed. “Grind. Please tell me I got at least a couple hours of sleep.”

  “I’d say you got thirty minutes.”

  “Lovely.” Quin smiled. “Lovely.”

  The ground shuddered, and massive rocks pried loose from the floor, shooting up into the sky, snapping onto the meteor. More followed, until it had doubled in size, before doubling again.

  Ardenidi hissed. “Well that’s going to be a pain.”

  {Ardenidi : MushroomCultivation IV : Mushrooms grow really big really fast}

  She poured mana into a shroom, and it expanded in a blast of vegetation, billowing around the meteor, before the stalk hardened into place, and the entire fungi was crushed, releasing bright purple spores, binding to the fire, pulsating heat, and areas of bright light, around the meteorite.

  Then the spores bloomed, absorbing the energy, and the meteor stopped in midair.

  The initial force—having broken the mushroom—connected to the ground, tearing into the stone in a wave of force that tossed me, Sern and Quin onto our backs and a great deal backwards, skin and faces numb.

  Ardenidi staggered, clutching her side, which glistened red from where debris had slashed into it.

  The mushroom suddenly disintegrated, and a familiar monster dropped down, cracking the smoldering floor. Now, with the rubble it’d added to itself, the Core was well over the size of a medium sized country cottage, and quickly growing, using the increased mana of the second floor to pull additional weight into his body.

  A dagger bonked against the Core’s shoulder.

  Quin sighed, pulling another from his inventory. “Grind! Do something already!”

  I pulled a shroom of my own from my inventory, twisted the cap, and threw it.

  The Core made a sound, not unlike chuckling, as the little red mushroom bonked harmlessly off its shell of rock. Then the little red mushroom exploded with a bright hot pop, and the entire core was thrown back several yards, raining black sand.

  Quin gagged. “Since when do you have RuptorShrooms?!”

  “This morning? Or at least in the morning? I grabbed them at some point,” I stated.

  “Those are legendary class area-one items!” Quin screamed.

  I blinked, glancing down at the cute little mushroom in my hand.

  ~Legendary~

  {RuptorShroom}

  [Explodes violently in a large area]

  [20-50 Str]

  I concentrated, and the index expanded.

  ~Legendary~

  {RuptorShroom}

  [Explodes violently in a large area of proportional to mana and fire affinities of the local area]

  [20-50 Str per cubic yard (Srd)]

  [Value : Extremely high]

  “Seriously?” I asked. “I kinda figured these things were everywhere.”

  “They’re worth a gold ring each!”

  I blinked. “They are?”

  Each mushroom could buy a house.

  The Core screamed, grabbing its stump of an arm, smoking with the remains of fungal spores. The husk of rock began to adjust itself, and a new arm sprouted out, snapping off the remains of the old.

  Ardenidi had gotten back to her feet, summoning a massive javelin, and chucking it into the core. It struck rock, then exploded, knocking more plates loose.

  It was like beating the Heraldess. The bigger the monster, the more spread out its mana was, and the easier it was to puncture through any given point.

  The Core immediately changed tactics, shedding rock in favor of a small, condensed, nine-foot body, with more humanoid proportions.

  A dagger bonked against its mouth, cracking a needlely tooth.

  The Core glared at Quin, grabbed the dagger, and ate it. Small pieces of metal popped up all along its body.

  Quin swallowed, pulling a hammer from his inventory. “Guys?”

  “On it!” I shouted, twisting another Ruptorshroom.

  The Core screamed, mouth of teeth hanging open.

  I threw the shroom and crossed my fingers, praying my hunch was right.

  As the Core screamed, the Shroom sailed through the air, bumping against the bridge of its mouth, and tumbling down, past its silver teeth, into its throat.

  The Core swallowed.

  And then, it exploded.

  Hunks of rock shot off its body, and an arrow blew out, skittering across the floor before disintegrating into raw mana.

  {Gauntlet of Stairs}

  [(-1) 0Hp]

  The Core ripped into its chest, gouging out large pieces of red fungi, before those started exploding, shattering rock.

  Ardenidi stopped in her tracks, holding another spear. “What was that?”

  “It’s an absorber!” I blurted. “So if there’s a weakness built in, then it has to do with its eating mechanic."

  “So you gambled that if it ate something unstable, or explosive, then that would be spread through its entire body, causing damage?” Ardenidi frowned, lowering her arm. “What would you have done if that didn’t work?”

  I shrugged.

  A smile perked out from her brown scarf. “You're gutsy. I like you.”

  “Hey, aren’t I gutsy too?” Quin whined. “I fought it and I don’t even have a supply of legendary mushrooms perfectly suited for this exact kind of fight.”

  Ardenidi looked him up and down. “You’re stupid and desperate, not gutsy.”

  Quin frowned. “It’s not like you helped much.”

  Ardenidi shrugged. “I know the secret, now. Do you have any more of those shrooms?”

  I pulled an armful of fifty or so out from my inventory.

  Quin made a series of unintelligible gasping and choking noises.

  “Split them up,” Ardenidi stated. She pointed to the Core, encased in a shell of solid metal, emitting a strange signature of mana. “That thing isn’t nearly done yet.”

  Ardenidi took twenty mushrooms, and me and Quin took fifteen each.

  When the Core finally reawakened, it was in for a rough time.