I had no choice but to turn my attention away from the boy and towards the battle on the beach.

When the smoke had settled, I had only lost one sloth, but another was badly wounded in a way no regeneration would repair. Iokua returned ruffled and bedraggled by sea salt after leading Kamahune away– he coughed and puffed and faked a limp to get my affection.

I casually brushed his mind with a reassuring emotion, and assured him he was indeed the very hero of the day. But I was elsewhere.

I sent out my wasps to kill Kamahune– but one died along the way to the sudden descent and snatching talons of a bird, and the other two failed to pierce his incredibly thick hide. They tried to stab at his eyes, but even there, his innate defenses were too strong. The jelly of his eye was like ice.

It was a second loss.

Once again I had encountered another hurdle my creatures were ill-equipped to overcome. And of course, I could imagine a solution. Kamahune was ferocious– but he was only a pig. I suspected he’d long ago failed the hurdle of evolution and simply mutated instead, growing stronger but no wiser. Defeating him would be easy.

I could simply borrow the adaptive camouflage of the octopus, combine with the digestive body of a slime, and…

He would charge straight into what looked like a rival, and end up engulfed in sticky, dissolving bile. Once that slowed him down I could pick at him with entangling, sturdy creatures meant to lock down his mobility further and crush him to death.

But there was a problem with designing a perfectly-tailored solution to your problems.

When the next problem came along, you would be back at square one needing a new solution.

No, I was too fond by far of scalpel-precise tools and sideways thinking. I enjoyed the mental victory of overcoming challenges by coming at them from the right angle. But I was also spending vast amounts of my own precious time on each hurdle. This was a bias I needed to address– I needed to learn to think with scalpels when the situation called for them, and sledgehammers when I could get away with it.

Innovation had a beauty of design. But brute force had an efficiency of thought.

My aim with this next creature then, wasn’t to defeat Kamahune in specific. It was to design a creature that could fight pound for pound and win. My serpents, fire-bees, deadly wasps– all were designed for assassination. Even the sloths, my best fighters, were simply a slight modification on evolution’s plans.

The goal was to reduce the work on my own plate– to exclude threats from needing my attention, by meeting them with overwhelming power. I would want intelligence as well– that would increase the number of perils the creature could handle without my intervention.

What I wanted was a lieutenant.

Setting myself to work, I put aside how I normally did things. Rather than a specialist, a generalist. Rather than assassination, sheer violence.

The best weapon I had available was Bite Strength combined with Beaked Jaws. The two would redouble each other, providing metal-crushing force. Add the Iron Keratin of the sloths and again the strength would redouble. Those three traits supporting one another were the core. And if I was investing in Iron Keratin, I wanted a scale based to apply it to, so I would have protective benefits as well.

That was four traits. At level zero, creatures had two, with an additional wildcard if they were made by a dungeon. At level one, that increased to three– four at level five.

I could purchase an additional trait– five– and add a sixth via my powers of mutation.

There would be one or two more wild card traits, but those were utterly unpredictable.

It would need Advanced Intelligence and Dexterous Claws to allow it to function as independently as possible.

But that left precious little room to maneuver. Reaching level five was absolutely necessary, and that limited my options. Only two of my Schema were at that level– the Undying Megalonachyd, and the Salamandral that I’d gained from choosing my phenotype. The latter I’d barely used– its main draw was its Regeneration, which the Megalonachyd already possessed.

It was possible to hybridize a higher level creature with a lower one and keep the better level, but if the two Schemas compatibility was low, level would degrade. The sloths already had some of traits I wanted, and seemed like the stronger choice but…

It had low compatibility with the scaled, beak fish I wanted to extract my biting abilities from.

It also left no room for any defensive options beyond Iron Keratin. The design began to feel less like a generalist and more… defined by what it lacked.

So, I gave up on Dexterous Claws. That I could add later, perhaps, but for now I would focus on battle strength. Instead I chose to keep Regeneration. A scaled and armored body would turn deadly blows to wounding ones– Regeneration would turn those wounds into nothing.

And as I made these decisions, the Salamandral seemed more and more like the better option of the two.

– Schema (Rare) –

Salamandral

Born from mud pools deep within the earth, salamandrals have few natural enemies except for the cold. Able to regrow, they will tear off their own tails and abandon them if death seems close; new salamandrals will be born from the abandoned appendage.

Level 5.

Relevant Traits:

Regeneration: Level 2

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Amphibious: Level 2

Parthenogenesis: Level 2

—

Cost: 46 iota.

As I advanced, designing creatures grew less like simply splicing two pieces together and more like building evolutionary trees. One combination wouldn’t be enough—

I first added the beaked fish into the salamandral, splicing in Bite Strength as my Mutagenic trait. The result were scale-covered, streamlined lizards the size of dogs, with finned tails adapted to slicing through the waters. Their muzzles ended in beaks, the bone the color of polished steel. Green-scaled frills and spines lifted up at the back of their skull into a standing crest shot through with streaks of yellow, but could collapse down to avoid dragging in the river’s flow.

It was a good first step…

And it was exhausting. I had gone too long without torpor. My mana reserves had been emptied, restored, emptied, restored. It was like rolling a boulder up a hill without end. The weight was grinding down on me and growing with each moment.

My mana was empty again. I felt distorted by the constant expansion and collapse of the energy within me. After this…

After this I would sleep.

But for now I needed to scrounge up some last reserve of power. I ordered the finished salamandral, with all the correct traits, to devour its kin, who had come out incomplete and wrong. A cruel order but– I was beyond myself.

It only gave me back a fraction of the mana I would need.

The finished salamandral was not compatible with the sloth. Not at all– but unless I combined them, the creation would not be fifth level. The cost of the sloth was a little into the hundreds. The finished salamandral cost about seventy. The math was not in my favor.

Like a hungry spirit, I roamed to the basket of gifts the humans had brought me from the beach. Shellfish. Crustaceans. Snails. I sucked them from their shells– their meager souls couldn’t prevent my mana from burning their flesh into nothingness.

None of them gave more than a single-digit mana.

They gave me new traits, yes, but–

One of them was unique. A vaporous glass thing, looking like nothing but an empty shell. The real nature of the creature was an elemental of twisting smoke that unfolded from the shell into reaching tendrils. They could be solid or totally ethereal. It was a clever, hiding thing.

I drank it from its shell. Examined the Schema. Sighed in relief.

– Schema (Rare) –

Cloudsea Nautilus

Fallen from a sea above the sea, this clever little omnivore can be as elusive as smoke. Its body is selectively solid and can reshape itself easily, allowing it to squirm free of predators, wiggle through tight cracks to sleep, and pry shellfish from their homes.

Level 1.

Relevant Traits:

Amorphous: Level 1

Advanced Intelligence (Spatial): Level 1

Elemental Body (Air): Level 1

—

Cost: 29 iota.

None of its traits mattered. The Schema itself was Rare.

And with that, my domain expanded. My consciousness and mana stretched over another 100 meters. The rush of information was dizzy.

By the gods. I needed to sleep. Information was flooding me. Cold and solid facts, the touch, the taste of everything. It was too much. I could feel things slipping past me. The details blurred. I had absorbed the following traits from the creatures harvested from the sea-shore:

Filter-Feeding

Pearl Creation

Radulae

Reinforced Shell

Ferrovore

Selective Gigantism

Burrowing

I had absorbed the following terrains: forests, swamps, lowland rivers.

Information was flooding through my being.

I tasted– madness. I felt my mind slipping. But as I veered towards total exhaustion, determination caught me from simply plunging into sleep. I was going to finish this. I would see this through.

I ate. I chewed away all the loose, soulless organic matter in the new domains. Decades of organic particles in the soil were stripped. Ivies, dead trees, eggs in their nests, bones and rotting meat. I dissolved them all as sparks of mana flickered throughout the forest.

I dragged power into myself and breathed it out.

New lifeforms collapsed out of the waves of my breath. The first combination was unsuitable, I discarded it. The second– likewise. Working with such high level creatures made the results unpredictable. I felt myself plummeting into torpor with every moment.

These failed attempts, I didn’t allow to reach completion and gain a soul. I simply dissolved them as they were halfway formed and immediately began work on another. In the core of my domain a pillar of light shone, in which the bodies of warriors formed and dissolved, a molten fusion.

But the third–

The third attempt rendered a perfect specimen. As the mana-sparks collapsed into solid flesh, it began to stand, even before its body was complete. It roared, beaked maw opening. The creature was humanoid and strong, with a scale-clad physique. It stood on two legs, its shoulders strong. Scales rushed up over the naked red musculature.

Its head was half-formed still, a skull in which staring eyes looked out. Sinews stretched down to the beaked and toothed jawbone. As flesh and skin closed over it was complete.

With a sigh of relief, I allowed myself to sleep– watching my creation lift her head up and hearing her roar to the sky.

— — —

A lemur leapt through the trees, following my new creation. Through its eyes I dimly saw– in sleep– what I had made.

She had a hulking frame covered in rough, armored scales, the color of algae on a stone beneath the river. Her movement was a ponderous knuckle-walk, using her muscular, expansive arms to help swing her along the ground, legs bent low. Spines ran in two columns down her spine. Those same spines emerged along the ridge of her skull, lifting up thin membranes of yellow and black to fly like flags atop the forward, arrowpoint shape of her head.

When she opened her mouth, it was not a single horizontal line– it was a three fold split, her low jaw dividing into two. This would allow her beak more crushing force, coming from two angles.

She looked draconic, powerful, ancient. Some long-forgotten predator shrugging off the seas and emerging to devour the land.

I was satisfied, but…

The proof would lie in battle.

As she came to the beach Kamahune had lay down to recover from his last fight. His bulk lay against the pebbled shore, chest rising and falling; but as soon as she approached some intuitive caution flickered through that boarish skull and he rose, flicking sand off his fur, snorting smoke from his nostrils.

She opened her trifold jaw and screamed a challenge.

The boar’s hooves kicked the loose earth below.

And on unspoken agreement, they rushed towards one another.