Henry stood still against the furthest point from the entrance as the seal approached. He triggered Alter Physique and started pushing his size upward. If there was going to be a fight, then some extra mass would help. He just wished he could increase his size faster. With his Mimicking Tentacles’ level, he could push all the way up to 43 Kg.

He felt like he wasn’t even at half of that. So it would take a while.

The seal made a couple of sharp trills while turning its face left and right, and Henry realized what it was doing.

“Echolocation? Seriously?”

He kept still. He was still mimicking a rock, tentacles wrapped around his body, and tried to change his color to blend in better. But as the seal got closer and closer, he knew he was made.

He had moved too much. The seal knew there was something around.

Henry cursed. A lot of people associated seals and baby seals with cuteness and circus acts, but Henry knew better. Especially if this kind had anything to do with leopard seals.

Those things were killing machines. They preyed on other seals and anything else that moved. They were apex predators.

And Henry knew they preyed on his kind as well.

The seal was now above his turtle shell. It nudged it a few times, and Henry cursed again as his home moved around him.

“This is happening I guess. And that settles it. I’m not moving from this area until I get enough levels to store the shell. At this point, it seems like I’m going to be vulnerable whether I’m large or small, so I might as well have the size to defend myself.”

The seal seemed to stop for a second before it tried again to roll the shell.

“I could try to chase it away… otherwise I should kill it quickly.”

Henry grimaced inwardly. He had no qualms about killing lionfish or sharks. Murdering seals didn’t feel great, though.

The seal finally found the entrance, and as it pushed its snout in, it made one last call.

An echo to confirm his presence.

The seal immediately grew excited, trying to reach deeper, its fanged maw wide open.

Henry pumped its face full of lionfish venom, using the one Inkjet charge he had. The seal recoiled violently, eyes squinted shut as it swam away.

He waited for a few seconds. “Damn. Should have tried biting it first. May–”

The seal rushed back in. It seemed like it had gone up for air, and now it looked aggravated.

The teeth appeared sharper. The eyes narrower. More intense. And there was an odd sheen to its coat, as if a soap bubble had been shaped and layered all over it.

Henry unrolled his tentacles and began making plans.

“Eyes. Nostrils. Throat.”

The seal pushed its snout into the turtle-home’s entrance and Henry’s bladed tentacles whipped forward. Two tentacles aimed at the seal’s eyes, but the mammal tilted its head down instantly. Henry’s blades hit the coat of the seal at an angle and just slid down the head of the seal, barely cutting into its fur.

The seal twisted and bit into his extended tentacles. It pulled him out, gnashing its jaw as it did.

It stung. The teeth definitely punctured his tentacles in a couple of spots, but that was it.

“A double question mark beast barely bites through, but that level 10 lionfish pincushioned me.”

Henry would have shaken his head if he wasn’t busy using the momentum of the seal’s thrashing to begin coiling his tentacles around its neck as it whipped its head, trying to sever the limbs in its mouth. He kept an eye out for other seals.

The seal began to thrash harder. Henry lined himself to its neck. “It’s you or me, buddy. And I’d rather stick around.” Then he bit down using Bite of the Whipcrack Shark.

A ghostly jaw bit down along with him and blood surged out of an oversized bite mark, but not as much as he’d expected. He saw the notifications come in, having gotten some flecks of blood and skin in his mouth, but the Bite of the shark–and his own–struggled to get through the oddly sheened coat of the seal.

The seal raised its head to screech an echoing call, and Henry knew he was now on a timer.

“Dammit.”

He turned the four tentacles he had around its neck into blades, immediately losing a good chunk of mana in doing so, and began constricting. “I need more strength.”

The seal thrashed and bit down, trying to pull him forward, but it still hadn’t managed to fully sever his limbs. Henry winced at the pain, but he continued digging his blades into its neck. He used Bite again, hoping to find a jugular and sever it.

The seal swam up, trailing blood while Henry chewed, eating through both the seal’s neck and his mana reserve.

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“Come on. Come on come on–there.”

He found it. His beak sliced through the vein like butter, and blood surged around him.

Their coat was incredibly hardy, diminishing everything he tried, but once he was through, the seal wasn’t that tough.

Henry looked up, continuing to tighten his blades as he did. A new seal was rushing toward him, and Henry decided it was time to let go.

He hoped the seal didn’t have a healing ability and would bleed out.

Henry hopped off and dove down. The second seal pursued. Henry squirted ink behind him and used an Ink Clone, which brought his mana under 40%.

Usually Telekinesis cost the most, but he’d been using his Skills pretty liberally, so he couldn’t fight this second seal. They were tough to damage, and he didn’t know how many more would show up.

An inky-black octopus–identical to Henry in all but color–shot to the right before diving to the rocks as well, limbs moving with unnerving realism. The seal followed for a moment before it made a trill sound and stopped. Its head whipped back, and Henry cursed.

He swam around a rock, scanning the sea floor, then found what he needed.

Henry dove down into a crack, barely getting in when the new Echo Seal slammed its jaw where he’d just been.

It tried to push its head through, but the rocks were too tight. Henry pushed himself deeper, trying to not think about how tight this crack was.

The seal made a couple of trills, then a louder call made it look up for a second. It looked back down at him, then swam away.

Henry immediately swam closer to the exit. The walls were closing in on him. When he knew for sure the seal was gone, he exhaled.

“That went alright.”

1x Echo Seal Core (E) was collected.

Echolocate is incompatible.

Slick Coat (F) was copied by Magic Mimic. Ephemerals are full.

Bite: Bite of the Echo Seal acquired.

Bite (E) - Level 1 -> 3

Mimicking Tentacles (E) - Level 6 -> 7

Inkjet (E) - Level 1 -> 2

“I guess that’s fair, considering I don’t have vocal cords. And Slick Coat… that was the defensive effect they had? Skill or… yes. A Skill. Alright. Now how about the Core… 21,560. Nice. Really nice.”

He could get some levels for it, and it should net him a few, but that was also a nice chunk of stats.

“Replace the detonation with Slick Coat for now and test it later. More defenses can’t hurt, but my offense is lagging. So… Strength? Strength and mana? More Constitution?"

That would give him the tools to get more seals. They couldn’t do that much damage to him, apparently. If he could dispatch them quickly, then he could fight off more than one at a time. Then with those cores, he could go up in levels. If he recalled correctly, every tenth level he’d be getting some extra stats from his Class.

“Though couldn’t I just do that right now? And if I hit level 50, I would get some more slots. I could try to go for achievements then?”

Henry paused, then shook his head. “No. That’s half-assing it. Again. I should be leveling my Skills. Getting new abilities and improving my stats before I go for levels. Having a low level will make getting Evolutionary points easier, and I need those.”

With that decided, he turned to the stats. “How much is it for Strength points?”

Henry checked his menus and did some quick math.

“That’s… 3 Strength points for 14k. Next Spirit point costs 3k. Constitution… 9k. Hmm. Oh. Perception’s cheap. Yeah. That’s worth more than just getting the levels I think.”

Henry ended up getting 3 Strength points, 1 Spirit and 2 Perception, which left him with 1728 Tokens. He waited through the usual light show, then pulled his updated stats.

Strength: 16 [3 Base][4 Class][9 Purchased] (2 Purchasable)

Constitution: 21 [3 Base][9 Class][1 Consumption][8 Purchased] (9 Purchasable)

Spirit: 17 [6 Base][4 Class][2 Consumption][5 Purchased] (3 Purchasable)

Perception: 14 [4 Base][4 Class][6 Purchased] (4 Purchasable)

Dexterity: 9 [4 Base][1 Consumption][4 Purchased] (0 Purchasable)

The seals hadn’t come back and it’d been at least a dozen minutes, so Henry slipped out of the crack he was resting in and swam back to his shell. His movements felt powerful. His eyes could see deeper, with more details.

“I should give Perception more love. But almost everything’s worth investing in, to be fair.”

When he arrived, he found the turtle shell dislodged from where he’d secured it, and it was laying flat on the sandy seabed. A gray and blue striped fish was peering curiously at him from within.

“It’s nice, isn’t it.”

Henry put a tentacle on the wilting kelp that he’d wrapped around it and sighed. The fish hid inside, and Henry looked around. He was outgrowing the shell, and it was… affecting his decisions. Negatively. But he didn’t want to discard it.

“The whales said it was a ‘sacred traveler’. Even the System seemed to know about them. It’s how I arrived here.”

Logically, it was too valuable to abandon. It must be some kind of treasure. And if he abandoned it in the middle of the ocean, he’d never find it again. But the strongest impetus was his attachment to this shell. It was the last thing that connected him to his old life.

“Hmm. It is a turtle that has traveled worlds though.”

Henry eyed it for a few seconds. A bit of red and purple from the multicolored underside was visible from this angle. He scooted lower, then hovered closer to the edge and gingerly bit into the ridge of the plastron.

It was like trying to bite through metal. He tried a few more angles with no success. Initially careful not to damage the shell, he quickly picked up the pace and put more strength into his bites, wondering why he hadn’t tried this before. After a couple of minutes, he concluded that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

With a sore jaw, he sat back down on top of the shell, his tentacles splayed around it as they tingled and grew, and looked down.

“I’ll try again in a few levels, I guess.”

Henry glanced up at the darkening sky above. He should probably get up there and check if there was anything nearby the seals could be living on. He didn’t expect any civilization around, but he should be careful of that, still. The whale’s warning was still fresh in his mind.

Two slots were empty in Skills and Traits each. He should look into filling those up as soon as possible, potentially with Skills that would mesh well with his core abilities so that they might merge once he got another evolution.

“About that…”

He checked if he could upgrade his E-Rank core Traits, but they were still locked.

“Dang. Alright.”

Henry swam up and considered in which direction he should explore for a new temporary home, then remembered his reserves of hoarded health were still low.

“Come on Henry. Learn from your mistakes.”

Henry swam down and picked the shell up–the gray fish zipped out of it–then headed back to the crack he’d found earlier. He put the shell near the entrance, then slipped through. It was uncomfortable, but it should last for a couple of hours.

He pushed Alter Physique to the maximum size, then triggered Hoard Vitals.

“After this, I’m hunting some lionfish. Or some seals.”

The goal was to store the shell in his Maw. And Mimicking Tentacle was progressing fast now that Razor Tentacle was part of it.

“60 Kg for the 7th level. I’m getting massive.”

Henry inched a bit closer to the exit. Soon enough, he wouldn’t fit anywhere.