*Scree!!!*

The beast cried out as it launched itself at me. I leaned back, moving out of a way, of the creature’s needle-like, sharp teeth, and gnashing three-sided jaws, then I retaliated by dropping my elbow onto the back of the “elder-mushroom leviathan’s” head. My elbow drop carried enough kinetic force behind it, that if we were back in the 14th Pearl, it wouldn’t have been strange for the entire continent to fall to pieces.

I currently stood several hundred feet tall, and I was facing off against a beast that was almost ten thousand feet tall. I was a giant facing off against an even bigger giant. The elder-mushroom leviathan was basically what you’d get if you took your standard, polka-dotted, red-cap mushroom and crossed it with a kaiju-sized boa constrictor.

The Chaotic Sea was filled with countless spheres and shards. Pieces of the material world that floated down, or rather up, into the nebula and then became mini-worlds in their own right. The Elder-Mushroom Leviathan was the ruler of the sphere Jack and I were currently in, and my task was keeping the creature occupied, while Jack and her fadelings quietly harvested everything that was off use from this sphere.

I didn’t mind having to fight alone. Fighting like this helped me get used to the world-shaking power that was now at my disposal, at a faster rate. It was enough so that I almost felt guilty about cheating a little at rock-paper-scissors so I could play the distraction during this time’s raid. I decided that next time I’d let Jack win, or that the very least, I’d play fair instead of leaning hard on my data-analysis and precognition, so that I could see what Jack was going to throw beforehand.

The Elder-Mushroom Leviathan tried to wrap itself around me. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, it was after all basically a giant snake. I responded by setting myself ablaze and growing countless spiky ridges. Elder-Mushroom Leviathan cried out and quickly slithered away from me. It was probably the fire that dissuaded the creature from its constriction attempt. The flames that covered my body were hotter than our Shattered World’s sun.

[I’ve gathered everything that wasn’t nailed down. Wrap things up on your end, and we can harvest the world-core] said Jack. Speaking through our mental connection.

I grunted as I sent Jack an affirmation, to let her know that I got her message. Then I sent her a warning to get clear of the sphere, so she didn’t get caught up in what was coming next. The sky shook as I bellowed with exuberance. A second pair of arms appeared behind me. Hinging into my shoulder blade and torso, like a set of wings.

I gave the Elder-mushroom leviathan a vicious kick and then began to pummel it. Each of the punches that I rained down on the beast carried 100,000,000 times the force of an old-world nuke. It wasn’t hard for me to deliver this kind of beating, what was hard was attacking while avoiding the Elder-Mushroom Leviathan’s own desperate attempts at lashing out. This pummeling lasted for only a few hours, before the Elder-Mushroom finally gave up the ghost.

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The last thing Jack and I did, before leaving the sphere and retreating to our recently reinforced, and heavily fortified, private dimension, was to plunder the world-core of the Elder-Mushroom Leviathan’s sphere. Each sphere and shard was essentially a miniature world. All spheres possessed a world-core, and many of the larger shards possessed one as well. World-Cores were important, because besides serving as the source for the power that natively flowed through a world, they also served as a crystallization of laws, or logic, for a given world.

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Thus digesting a world-core could not only increase one’s strength but it could also dramatically increase one’s attainments and understanding of given laws, and aspects, of reality. Jack and I would consume this world-core together, and then through our continued dual-cultivation, we’d multiply the effectiveness of the core, and our speed of digesting the core.

After the world-core, the next most valuable thing we’d harvested from the mushroom-sphere was the body and spirit of the sphere’s guardian, the Elder-Mushroom Leviathan. The creature was an entity that would amount to a world-destroying, cosmic threat, if it appeared in the material world normally. The power that had flowed through its flesh and blood was enough to make millions of miraculous medicines and artifacts, if placed in the hands of a master alchemist, or master crafter.

Then there were the more normal gains, the countless plant samples, fauna, and minerals that I’d get the pleasure of analyzing and cataloging later in the week. The rich anomalous energy of the chaotic sea assured that nothing we found was ever less than legendary. Jack and I were sailing through a realm of peril and endless bounty. We reveled in the thrill of seeing and gathering things no one had ever seen, or touched before, and we found a secondary pleasure in sharing some of our finds with our friends and business partners, Alina and Sigi.

We couldn’t share everything though, part of that was us being secretive, because there was only so far that regular friendship could be taken, and the other part was us protecting our shattered world. There was often a reason that these spheres and shards got jettisoned from the worlds that they were originally part of.

Worlds often tossed away parts of themselves, for the same reason human beings sometimes threw up, or evacuated their bowels, when they were feeling ill. It was a way of getting rid of hazardous materials. I was pretty sure that the mushroom-world would no doubt reveal a number of mushroom species that flatly couldn’t be brought back to the Shattered World lest the materials destroy the world by triggering some kind of cataclysmic event.

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With its world-core gone, the ravaged mushroom sphere quickly began to crumble and fall apart. The chaotic energies that made up the majority of the chaotic sea ate away at the space like acid eating through packing foam. Jack and I huddled together above the disintegrating remains of the mushroom sphere, before entering our private dimension.

The core-treasures that now made up our central bodies might have looked roughly like our original selves, but our main bodies were quite abstract. I was a swirling nothingness filled with countless galaxies made up of energized-data instead of conventional stars. Jack was a nebulous all-consuming nothingness that looked black, in white, in black, imprinting itself on the eyes of the beholder like a camera’s flash, or the light of a too bright, strobe-bulb, until it triggered either madness, or blindness.

“Okay, this is looking like this was a pretty good take, should we call it a night, or should we go look for another sphere to raid?” said Jack.

I was in high spirits after having had a great fight, so I extended a pseudopod in Jack’s direction, pulling the hungry darkness of her true-form towards the center of my true-form.

“Mhm, let’s do another…” I said.

Jack laughed, ripples of bright darkness running up and down her immense form as she did so.

“Tch, someone’s feeling frisky. Fine, but this time I get to fight the boss monster, while you go hunting for resources,” said Jack.

“Yes, ma’am,” I purred. My pseudopods imparted a bit of mental energy to Jack’s amoeboid darkness. The equivalent of a kiss, for when we were in our true-forms.