Gorger lifts his hand, his chunky bone-plated finger pointing forwards, he concentrates and commands his mana and a large plume of fire bursts out of his fingertip.

It was supposed to be a small flame projectile. The symbiont charges through the flames and lands a full body punch on Gorger’s finger, which does nothing to Gorger but hurts the symbiont’s hand. Gorger frowns and stares at his own finger for a second, a second which the symbiont takes to land another punch, this time right in the face.

Gorger slaps the symbiont away, to the other side of the arena, before turning and walking away from the ring.

Gorger grunts and babbles his nonsensical nonlanguage, clearly pissed off.

“But you have yet to improve.” Merlin says, his voice a mix of disapproval and actual concern. In response, Gorger simply puts his hands on his hips and sighs, with all of his mouths.

“Perhaps an opponent that also uses magic would give better results.” Gorger looks up and stares at Merlin. “Not me.”

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Another symbiont jumps down into the pit. This one is Crabby, a mixture of fleshling, nerveling, blood elemental and a shrimp living armor. They walk on six legs and have a long shrimp tail, their main weapons are two claws that shoot liquids.

Crabby opens up their claws and shoots out blood created from the elemental, which is also electrified by the nerveling. Gorger simply lets it hit him for a few seconds before slurping it up. Hmmm, watching him gave me an idea. I activate my voice box.

“Every time you have tried to cast a spell you have used your hands. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but that’s also not really you right? I mean, honestly, you don’t even use your hands that much to interact with the world, shouldn’t you use the appendages you are most comfortable with?”

Gorger frowns a bit, not an annoyed frown, but a hard thinking frown. He slurps up the magic blood and lightning with gusto, this time I can feel him truly tasting it. He concentrates on that feeling, on the taste of magic, and then he spits a fire bolt.

Which is very easily intercepted by the blood of the symbiont. Gorger eyes widen and he looks down at his hands, his large hands with a single large mouth in each.

He lifts his hands, palms and mouth forwards, fingers splayed, he concentrates and commands his mana and two fire bolts shoot out of his hands.

Gorger blinks a few times, then he lifts his arms and starts to shoot fire bolts one after the other. He stops for a second, opens his arms wide and screams.

“BLUGHRGRT?!”

“No, you are not dumb.” Merlin says.”...You are just, hmmmm.”

Merlin taps his crystal face while Gorger looks at him.

“Not smart?”

Gorger spits the largest fireball yet at Merlin.