I feel sick. I didn't know I could even get sick. My body aches all over, but most of all between my eyes. It's like a concentrated buzz trying to penetrate my head. With two of my legs I rub my 'temples' while I absorb another chunk of the One Beneath. Time has not been kind to the One Beneath, but, well, neither have I hehehe. I must have absorbed almost three quarter of the One Beneath, only the portion around it's head and core remains. How long did that take me? Honestly, I have no idea. Once I started really guzzling it up, I lost track of myself. I just started single mindedly absorbing all that I could. Within limits of course, wouldn't want to blow myself up. But that's about as far as my self control went.

It was only just recently that I came back to myself, and by then I had done all this. I think I came to because of this ache. It wasn't really present before, I know that much, but now that I'm eating tissue closer to the core the ache is definitely getting worse. Or maybe I'm just in a massive growth spurt. Correction, I'm certainly in a growth spurt, but maybe it's getting too much?

I look at the hole I came out of, which I somehow haven't eaten yet. It's tiny. So tiny one of my legs can't even fit in it. The only thing that still fits is one of my arms, but only when I compress it about as far as is possible without it becoming unusable. How much have I grown then? Let's just say, one of those catodiles, yeah I can now just flick them away with a tentacle. That'd make me about 1/8 of the total size of the One Beneath. But the numbers don't add up since I've already consumed 6/8 of the One Beneath. So either the consumption is inefficient, it's going somewhere else, or I'm not consuming as much as I thought I did. Whatever it is, though, I'm kind of glad I'm not growing as big as the One Beneath.

Without thinking I absorb another chunk and I immediately shudder. Yup, definitely getting heavier. But I can’t really stop eating. On one hand I don't really want to myself, but there's also some primal urge to consume it. I don’t really know how to explain it. It just doesn't feel right to stop prematurely. Though I think a short break wouldn't hurt. At least now I'm aware and dangerous enough to explore this cave without any real repercussions. And who knows. Maybe the ache is settled by then.

So with a small bit of lingering doubt I push myself away from the remains. I still can't exactly swim, but I trust enough in my arms to pull me back to the floor if needed. This does give me an idea though. I need to learn how to swim someday anyway. The waters surface is way to far above to not swim, though I can now definitely sense the border above. I'd never reach it with just pushing off. So without further ado I start flailing around majestically.

.....

This, is harder than I thought I'd be. Flailing my legs around only helps so much. I can get some acceleration, sure, but so can a snail. I try to remember if octopuses can even swim, but I'm not sure. Squids can swim with some kind of special jet organ or something, but I seem to be lacking that. And if I do have it, I haven't discovered it. After one last spastic flail I give up. The best I can manage is some sort of slithering motion with my legs, but that is extremely slow. I let myself sink slowly back to the One Beneath and crawl to the ocean floor. The loose rocks on the ground now feel like sand beneath my body and the sand, well, it doesn't even register anymore. I don't drag my body across the floor, instead I have it floating some distance above and drag myself forward with my legs. I have tried laying my body on the ground, but that was just exhausting.

I roam around the cave for a while, but eventually find myself at the edge of the craters. At first they were huge, but now I can probably fill half of them with my own body. I wish I tracked how long I was eating, because it must have been long, months at least. How else would I explain such massive growth? Being close to the crater lakes is still uncomfortable. Well, I should be glad it's only to the extend of being uncomfortable. Thinking of what it did to some of those eels it's probably comparable to standing over an uncovered, running nuclear reactor. You know, not the thing any sane person would do. Not that I feel particularly insane. Not right of mind either. Who would be in this situation? But all in all I still feel pretty rational.

I prod around the crater with my arms while I celebrate my continuing sanity internally. The closer my arms get to the liquid, the more they tingle. Only when it really starts to hurt I pull back. They're really strange, the craters. What would leave perfectly cylindrical holes? And three of them? And then also devastate some of the toughest material I've ever come across, meaning the One Beneath. Sure, I myself might be able to delete it easily but watch. When I punch it with all my force the only thing happening is I hurt my tentacle. Auw.

I turn my attention back to the craters while rubbing the punished tentacle. I take my distance a bit though, trying to take in more of the whole picture. If I look closely at the shape of the crater and the cutoff line in the One Beneath, it almost seems as the point of origin of the three detonations was at the surface, while the One Beneath was lying on top of it. Why does that feel familiar? Three craters, my hollow, which would mean...

I look at what's left of the One Beneath. Oh, I hope I'm wrong, but that doesn't stop me from moving up to the One Beneath and sizing it up. Now that it has shrunk and I have grown, the remains are only about 3 times as big as me. Add to that the feeling that I'm way stronger than I should be, I think I should be able to just flip the carcass over. It would be way easier than digging my tentacles underneath it in search of something that may or may not be there, though I am highly suspicious it is there.

I brace myself, digging my eight legs into the ground while my front legs and arms are put up against the body of the One Beneath. I prepare myself as much as possible and then with all my might, I push. Hard. With immediate result. The One Beneath shifts from its position that it has been in for who knows how long. Before it can come back down I shift forward and slowly push the One Beneath further up. The first thing that reveals itself is my hollow, but with one more push the edge of another reveals itself. With another push my suspicions are confirmed. There is another egg. Which would make us complete. Me, an egg, three craters. Five people falling from the sky.

As I hold the remains of the One Above (Previously One Beneath) up, I stretch one of my arms to gently grab to egg and move from the One Above to the open water. I slowly follow it and when I'm from under One Above, I unceremoniously drop it, demoting it back to the One Beneath. I look at the egg. Impossibly small next to my current size. If I were a human, the egg would be the size of an ant or flea, something in between that. Thankfully I have enough control over my arm that I can shrink it to a size it can interact with the egg. The first thing I do is touch the surface and let in a miniscule pulse to search for any signs of life. But there aren't any. There's nothing in there except a skeleton. A human skeleton. I recognize who this skeleton was by the clothes it somehow still wears. It's the girl. The girl who was already dead before we hit the water.

My thoughts become jumbled as a flood of emotions hit me. I quickly switch my attention between the One Beneath, myself, the three craters and the egg. The sudden feeling that this situation is real, combined with the fact that I'm the sole survivor, left here all alone in a strange place, under water. With the apparent corpse of one of my fellow victims as my only company. It's to much. I curl myself around the egg, being extremely gentle not to break it and lay still on the ground. I can't sleep though, so I'm left awake with my mind silently asking questions impossible for me to answer.

Why did this happen? Why us? Why me? Why did the rest die? How did they even seemingly explode? Why did I change? What did the One Beneath do? Is this situation its fault? How did it do it? Why did it do it?

All questions without answers.

====

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

I've finally settled down. Somewhat. I'm still very distraught, but at least I'm not catatonic anymore. I uncurl myself, still being extremely careful of the egg. I should bury her. Give her a proper rest. It's the least I could do for her. I gently grasp her with one shrunken arm, while I dig a hole with the other. As deep as I can, straight down. When I can't dig any further I pull my arm back and with the other lower the egg down into the hole. When she's at the bottom I do her one final justice and release a pulse into the eggshell, freeing the contents into the open water. I quickly retract my arm while collapsing the hole. I give her a moment of silence. I didn't know her. Haven't even seen her around the ship. But I still feel some sort of kinship with her, even though she hasn't suffered the same experience as I.

Only when I feel I've paid enough respect do I turn away from the grave. Focusing fully on the remains of the One Beneath. I'm still not sure how it did it, but I'm almost without a doubt that it is solely responsible for this situation. It seemed to already paid for it with its life, but that's not enough. No, I want it desecrated, gone. And the best thing I know how to do that is consume it. Maybe then I'll finally be free of this urge. I'm sure it'll help with this anger boiling up in me and that's reason enough to jump in with gusto. I'm not going slow anymore like before. No, I'm not stopping until the One Beneath is the One Within and I want that as soon as possible.

I ram both my arms and front legs into the One Beneath and just start absorbing. Not bothering anymore with taking tiny chunks. A flood of matter and energy enters me, heating up all four limbs, the route to the cores and even the course themselves. But I don't care for that. I'm on a mission. And that mission ends with its annihilation. The One Beneath rapidly starts shrinking, it's clearly visible within my vision. At a slightly slower rate I can feel myself grow. Streams of energy spread from my cores towards the rest of my body. Not all of the energy is going to my body. In fact I'd say it's a minority. Most of it stays within the cores, condensing there and adding to its mass, without making it physically bigger.

Soon enough, but still after a good while, nothing remains of the One Beneath but it's core and pathways to its tentacles. Everything else is just gone. I can finally calm myself down a bit. I still want those final pieces within me, but that won't be possible without a change in tactics. These remains are way to dense with energy. I think if I swallow it, it would be the same as swallowing uranium. Not exactly something I want to do. Maybe if I solve my current mystery, maybe that'll give me a hint of what to do with the remains. Do you know what mystery? Yes, exactly. Why the fuck does it only have one core?!

I can't even make out what it's made of. I tried while feeling around, but the core bites back. With which I mean it sends so much energy into me it burns me and I can't make any sense of what it burned me with. Wait. I can make sense of it, since I've definitely absorbed lots of it! A quick scan of my body reveals no real imbalance between the two energies, which must mean that core is made of both. It's fused. I look inward at my own two cores. If they were one, maybe then it'd be possible to safely absorb this other core. They are some distance away from each other. But not an impossible distance to cross.

I think I have an idea now, but I'm sure it's going to hurt. I could do it swiftly, like ripping of a band aid, but that'll take to much risk. If I want this done correctly, I'll need to do this slowly. I take a moment to gather my wits, calm my nerves and push away the hesitation. When I feel like I'm ready I Focus inward, specifically on my two cores and the area in between. For my plan to work I need to get them together, which means the tissue in between needs to disappear. I really focus on that part and just like with my teeth will it to recede and disappear. It does not go as planned. This tissue resist way more to being manipulated than my teeth ever did. Just to by certain I try it again on them, but they appear and disappear with minimal effort, so the ability hasn't gone anywhere.

Why then, doesn't it work with the other place? I ponder it over but can't come to any conclusion. Maybe it really is some innate ability that only works on some parts. But that seems unlikely to me, as the composition of the tissue between my cores is not at all different in that of my legs, and they regrew just fine. I'll just try to push harder. I pump way more energy within that part of my body and try to manipulate it, order it to move aside. I push more and more energy into it, until finally I feel it give in and it retracts, leaving a hollow between my two cores. My body apparently does not like the new hollow as the walls immediately starts sinking back in, which feels extremely uncomfortable. With a large amount of control I will the walls to stay put, but I'm not at all prepared for what happens next.

My body still wants to fill the hollow, but since the walls aren't budging, it has apparently decided on the next best thing. The cores. Within a moment they shoot towards each other and collide. Time slows down to a crawl as a searing but bearable pain spreads through my body. It's like I've been punched in the heart twice, which isn't that far off from what actually happened. The cores don't stop when they collide, though. Ever so slowly they seem to sink into each other, becoming one whole. The two different energies start interchanging. Making the cores fuse more thoroughly as time passes. Not only the cores fuse. The water parts are now taking on organic parts and visa versa. Everything is mixing thoroughly. The only exception being the pathways in my arms and front legs.

That doesn't stop them from losing control and start flailing, just like my other appendages. They're violently spasming out and hitting all the stuff around them. This also means that I lost my footing and am now slowly falling towards the core of the One Beneath. My actual eyes widen as I can do nothing to stop myself, since I don't have control over my body. It seemingly takes ages, though it probably was only a few seconds, but I finally touch the core directly with my forehead. The skin there parts immediately giving the foreign core a straight path towards mine. I can merely watch as I wait until contact is made. But when these two touch as well, they immediately turn the fusion process into overdrive.

Within a second I've just one core. One core that is way to large, dense and energetic for my body. All the energy that failed to get absorbed at initial contact is swirling in and around it. My core was already impossibly dense, but now with the addition of all the energy in the One Beneath's core it's almost like a black hole. Luckily without the constant attraction of new matter, but the swirling mass of energy around it looks very much like a accretion disk within my vision. All of a sudden the accretion disk falls into my core leaving my body eerily quiet. Just moments before it was a swirling storm of energy and now it's just gone. That much energy can't just disappear, right?

Unluckily for me, it hasn't. I can feel the buzz of my core turn into a whine, heating my body up immensely within an instant. The water around me immediately starts to boil and soon enough the sand and rock beneath me redden and melt. It's too much energy for my body to hold, I need to release it, I know I do, but I can't really do anything with my limbs just flailing around. I don't want to suffer similar fate as that of the other three victims. So with an immense display of willpower, I slowly turn my front legs and arms up towards the ceiling of the cave. I can feel my core start to expand, which scares me so much I immediately try to push energy into my legs and arms. And it works, too well. They too immediately start swelling painfully.

With all my might I try to direct the flow of ever more into my limbs that are now aiming up. When I feel my limbs are about to burst, the floodgates open. A massive surge of energy shoots up, vaporizing everything in it's way. Water, rock, fish, animals. Nothing is spared as everything disintegrates. A tunnel opens up from me right to the surface and beyond. A massive pillar of blue greenish light. More and more energy pushes its way out of me enlarging the beam. It hurts. It hurts so much. I'm burning alive, but the massive amount of energy from my own core is somehow regenerating my body as fast as it is falling apart. When I feel I can't take it anymore the beam collapse in on itself, leaving above me a massive hole with the blue sky in the distance. Moments later the sea collapses back with a force that immediately knocks me up and away, destroying the remaining walls of the cave, leaving only a bumbling pool of lava.

I land back on the ocean floor a good distance away, but the water is hot here as well. I look back at where I came from, which is now a glowing sea of molten rock and boiling water. Definitely inhospitable. But with that release I feel better. Way better. Better than I've ever felt since coming out of the egg. Though I said I would take it slow, fate apparently had another idea. I take a quick look inside me and spot a singular core, stable and buzzing. Though it still seems oversized to what my body should have. It has definitely improved some things though. I feel even stronger than I already was and my radar range has expanded immensely, I can now spot multiple islands in the distance which I certainly couldn't see before.

But I'm finally free from innate urges and other attachments. Nothing's tying me down here anymore. I can finally move out. Spread my wings (tentacles). And with my current size, I'm sure I don't have any dangers to be afraid of. In fact, it's more accurate to say that now, I am the danger.