With a seemingly bottomless supply of cosmic water and an unending number of opponents, it wasn’t long before Mike’s core had reached the size of a coconut, and completed a full revolution in around 5 seconds.

“I'm officially a nutter!” he joked to himself upon reaching the new core size, before heading out to assimilate his upgraded physical prowess.

By now, he was relatively used to the incremental growth and after only one fight, which was against another rock-like creature that died easily to his Rock Tunneling fists, he headed back to focus on making it to the next stage. He didn’t know what to expect, whether he would need to coat his core many times over in one go to grow it from the size of a coconut to the size of a watermelon, but he trusted that he would be able to figure it out, just like he always had.

One thing he had noticed was that each progressive growth of his core and channels required more and more energy. It used to be that a single kill would fill up his soul space, but it barely made a dent in his core’s bottomless appetite.

Laying on his back, he proceeded to bring out vessel after vessel of cosmic water from his spatial storage bag, but the core seemed bottomless.

“Can you imagine how many creatures’ dead bodies I would have had to hug to extract this much energy?” he said in wonder as he poured the last few drops of a vessel onto his stomach, “No wonder that huge bird was so greedy about this stuff.”

Eventually, he did manage to reach capacity, but at the cost of consuming a quarter of all of the remaining water he had. At this point, his small, rocky cave was covered in a small puddle that would take weeks to dry out, but he paid it little attention as he turned inwards, eager to make the jump to the next tier of power.

Not knowing what else to do, his first approach was to simply do what he had done every other time. Grabbing the energy in his saturated channels, he pulled it together and forced it to surround his core, even matching the speed, but nothing happened. Figuring that the failure was likely due to the core not yet being watermelon sized, he continued making coat after coat of energy, until the mental strain became too great and the great ball of energy he had formed burst apart, creating waves that crashed painfully through his system.

The pain was almost on par with growing new channels, and he found himself gasping for breath. Which is ironic considering I don’t breathe anymore. Just one more habit my body has created that is no longer applicable.

Not knowing what else to do, he fell back on thinking about his channels like a sprinkler system, which hadn’t steered him wrong yet. Increasing the size of the core was secondary, what he really wanted to do was to make the core push more power through his body, which, as far as he could tell, was accomplished by the core’s rotation. The core had always increased its rotation on its own, and he had simply aimed to match it, did he dare increase the speed?

An idea suddenly occurred to him, what if he increased its rotation simply by having it spin in both directions at once. It was already spinning on the horizontal plane, so maybe he should just try to have it spin on the vertical plane as well.

And due to angular acceleration always pulling inwards, increasing this kind of speed should naturally allow the core to retain more mass. He concluded, happy that his brain could now easily recall physics lessons from decades prior.

Gathering the energy again, he proceeded to surround the core, forcing the energy to match the horizontal rotation of the core. When they were fully synchronized, he willed his core to begin turning vertically as well. Nothing happened at first, but as he continued focusing, it began to shift ever so slightly, and suddenly all of the energy he had accumulated was being sucked into the core as it grew and expanded.

After the most painful channel-wash he had experienced to date, he looked at his now watermelon sized core with delight, noticing how it was now spinning slightly on an axis.

“Huh, I am really surprised that worked.” he said aloud, “I really didn’t think that would.”

⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫

After a much needed rest, which Mike could take only after digging out a small side tunnel to avoid his flooded den, he set out to train some more. He could tell just by walking that his channels had undergone yet another fundamental shift, as his every movement excluded power in ways he had never been capable of before.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Upon exiting the tunnel, he took a few laps around his crater to make sure he had a handle on his movements, before heading out to find something to fight. He already knew that there were thousands of beasts at the watermelon to pumpkin stage near the spatial tear, but he wanted to find an isolated opponent if at all possible.

After a few hours of searching, it became apparent that that was not possible, and he began to suspect that every creature at his new power level had congregated at the rift, so with some reluctance he made his way over to them.

Spying from a few craters away, he noticed again how the beasts formed a reasonably orderly line, each waiting their turn, which stood in juxtapose to his encounters with them. It was eerie to see creatures that could single handedly destroy a country’s capital before the System integration simply sit and wait their turn. It wasn’t that he doubted at all that they were intelligent, rather, he doubted their self control after fighting with them time and time again.

Finally, after a few hours of watching, he spotted some commotion. He didn’t know what had caused it, but two beasts began tearing into each other. Both were far more powerful than Mike was, with cores in the early pumpkin stages, however, one core was decidedly bigger, making him suspect who would be the winner.

The stronger of the two was a humanoid beast with four arms, each carrying large rock hammers, which were currently parrying a steady stream of fireballs, being launched from the second creature, which appeared to be a weird mixture of a large cat and a star. Not only was the first beast stronger, but in Mike’s estimation, it had a natural advantage, being that rocks were so resilient to heat… at least that is what he thought initially. The heat emanating off of the second beast began to rise, until the space around it seemed to distort. Thought the rock humanoid was able to keep up with the stream of fireballs, parts of its hammers began to sluff off under the pressure of the calefaction.

Rather than being put on the back foot, the damage seemed to enrage the creature, and it seized the momentum of the fight, charging forward until it was within striking distance of the other creature, and began its own assault.

It was a somewhat surreal experience to watch two mythical creatures fight each other, especially with lights from laser cannons and earth’s sun streaming through a magical hole in reality less than a half mile away.

The confrontation ended when the fire cat had had enough, and it bolted away into the surrounding countryside–or maybe asteroid-side a was more apt name. A few creatures behind the rock creature seemed to weigh it with calculating eyes, but none of them made a move to start a confrontation. Rather, the patient line reformed as did the monotony of Mike’s vigil.

After another few hours, another fight broke out, and Mike actually witnessed the cause of this one–it was so childish that he had a hard time not laughing out loud. Two creatures of similar power level were standing in line, when one of them simply cut in front of the other.

Rather than simply explaining, “No buts, no cuts, no coconuts” as any school child would, the offended party immediately attacked the other creature, large metallic quills appearing from its body. The offender was prepared for this outcome, and a similar scene to earlier replayed itself. These two creatures were more powerful than first, and Mike was struck with just how far he still had to grow before he was ready to pass through the rift.

When the fight concluded, Mike felt reasonably confident on how to test his prowess against creatures of similar power level to himself, having cut many a school-bus line as a kid, so the only real question was which creature to cut. As he traced the energy signatures, it became readily apparent that the beasts were more or less lined up in order of core-size, with some outliers for beasts who were outliers for their fighting prowess at their given core strength. This made it easy to find a good candidate, as he just had to walk to the beginning of the line where the rest of the watermelons hung out.

Not wanting to bite off more than he could chew, he decided to just cut in front of the very last creature in line, whose core was equal to his own. He was fully prepared for the confrontation, but it never came. The batlike creature behind him simply bowed its head, refusing to meet his challenging gaze.

The next creature was similarly shy, as was the next. This made sense to Mike, as each of their cores were all about the same size, so it was a toss up to know who would win in a fight. It wasn’t until the fifth beast, whose core was around Mike’s size but definitely bigger, that he got himself a battle.

The slim humanoid had been eyeing him with each progression he made up the line, and attacked as soon as he was in front of her, at least he thought it was a she, gender identity only got harder the more unknown an entity was.

Standing slightly below his own height, she was wiry and fast, wielding two pieces of metal that seemed to burn with cosmic energy. He activated Footsteps of the Wind right from the get go and in conjunction with Damage Premonition, managed to avoid all of her strikes. He sensed that she was somewhat close to rational thought, but wasn’t quite there, making her strikes mostly predictable, although ruthlessly vicious.

Within a few moments he had isolated her attack patterns and sent in a strike of his own, taking her completely off guard and knocking her backwards. Realizing that he had underestimated himself, he bowed to his opponent and left the line. He would come back later and cut a little more towards the front.