The first one she chose for Erik was the one she herself felt a retively high link to, but she was sure it wasn’t as strong as Erik’s was, judging by how they expined their different feelings about the links. She reasoned that one might have an elemental power seeing that she felt a strong affinity to it as well.

  Jessie still hadn’t meditated on merging herself with her magic yet, and she wanted to do that first. There was no reason for Erik to wait, however. If Jessie did that first, she would even definitely know what her supportive spells did. She had cast her Water spell on him once, but he barely felt anything. She needed to know the details of it.

  Erik was handed the crystal Jessie chose to go first. She called it ‘Leviathan Caress’, which sounded a bit ominous. Based on just his one absorbed spirit’s name, Sovereign Faith and his Authority aura ability, the name could imply some sort of effect, as Sovereign meant leader, who was a figure of authority. Even Faith could imply some sort of leadership, or rather, subservience to something.

  What Leviathan and Caress could imply, he wasn’t sure. He waited until Jessie was deep in meditation, looking to her increased red glow for confirmation, before starting to absorb Leviathan Caress. He put it up against one of his hexagonal slots, and entered meditation.

  For the first time, Erik didn’t arrive in this weird, magical pce in the middle of bckness, overlooking his magical sea sphere. He was inside it, or inside himself.

  That didn’t mean his senses were limited to his own manifestation of his body inside this pce, however. He could still see everything inside the sphere, though other than the cliff without a beginning and the sea, there was nothing to really look at inside.

  He wasn’t only limited to the inside, though. As he encompassed the sphere’s outer yer as well, he could still gaze into the darkness surrounding it. It was there he found Leviathan Caress, far away in the abyss. With no up and down, it was right in front of him, no matter where it was.

  It was a bck, solid shape, but it had eyes which moved back and forth, and a wide mouth with enormous, jagged teeth in several rows and columns. As he watched it, the dark creature shot forth at amazing speed, heading straight towards Erik’s sphere. Despite it getting closer, Erik felt no connection to the thing, which was odd. Absorbing Sovereign Faith had been all about bringing it closer to the sphere. That didn’t seem to be the case now.

  The creature, even more massive now that it was closer, threatened to crash into his sphere as it only gained more speed the closer it got. It was already clearly more than thrice the size of the massive sea sphere, and it seemed to only grow.

  Was this thing about to destroy everything? What would happen if Erik couldn’t stop it? Would his magic die, or would he have to spend years picking up the pieces, hoping to rebuild it again? It didn’t matter. He had to stop that thing.

  His physical manifestation of himself vanished as he visualised raising his arms to catch the beastly missile, but nothing else happened. He barely had seconds to figure something out. He could hear the loud roar of the beast, despite it still being what seemed like hundreds of kilometres away. Two seconds. Think!

  Erik raised his arms to block once more, this time pulling the entire sea with him. The sea split apart into two separate ocean tentacles, leaving only the lonesome cliff behind. The water from the waterfall also split, ending in something resembling a tail of the double-tentacled form.

  Erik pushed the ocean arms against the beast, causing it to crash into the arms and spsh a whole lot of magic seawater into the void. Still, the arms held. Erik felt the creature pushing him back more and more, but something else was happening at the same time. Erik felt a bond between himself and Leviathan Caress form as the absorption began.

  Having caught the beast at a slight angle, they were now spinning through the void, rotating despite the ck of direction. The beast had lost all of its speed, but it still overpowered Erik slightly, pushing him closer and closer back towards the sphere. He could sense that, despite the absorption having started, the right way wasn’t to make it slowly descend on his sphere like this. He had to defeat it as well.

  Erik changed tactics, pulling one of his tentacles away from the beast. This increased the rate of descension, but he had to risk it. With as much power as he could muster, he smmed the free tentacle into the beast’s face. It roared with gring teeth as Erik continued beating it. It was working, but it still wasn’t good enough.

  The beast fought back with a wide swipe of its cw, and Erik’s tentacle holding the beast back was torn apart. He quickly reformed it using some of the water from the other tentacle and both ended up clearly diminished. The waterfall couldn’t keep up with the rate the sea level dropped.

  Seeing that the beast’s speed was gone, Erik started pounding it with both tentacles, enjoying more flexibility with the smaller arms. They were quickly approaching base level, however.

  In a final attempt, Erik twisted the thin tentacles around the Leviathan and used every bit of strength he could muster to flip the beast around. It somehow worked, and Erik was now on top of the beast, receiving swipe after swipe targeting his tentacles as both him and the beast fell towards his emptied sphere.

  Erik strained to keep the beast from falling too hard into it, instead pulling it back away from the sphere as hard as he could. It slowed the fall down just enough. Erik felt the absorption going smoothly after he flipped the beast, meaning he was doing the right thing.

  Eventually, with only thin streams as arms, Erik pced the now much smaller Leviathan down, its movements completely still. The st few seconds, it had completely given up fighting back, and Erik felt like he was putting a baby down in its crib, rather than fighting a monster.

  As he let his tentacles go, they nded in mere puddles on and around the beast. Luckily, the waterfall was working in overdrive to refill Erik’s ocean, and the puddles were quickly joined to low sea.

  The beast had turned to solid stone, and as the sea level rose, so did the newly formed isnd, floating in the sea. It had a small ke in the middle, where a puddle on top of it had settled.

  Erik watched as his sphere filled back up to full over the next couple of hours. He was exhausted, but had somehow managed. The clean air and calming environment helped him regain his strength.

  A four-legged mini-version of the beast that now floated on the sea as an isnd appeared behind Erik.

  “Leviathan Caress, I take it?” Erik asked, turning to the creature.

  “Greetings, Master Titan,” the creature said, sitting down next to Erik, gazing out towards the sea and the isnd it was a miniature of.

  Its voice was androgynous, giving no sense of its sex. Erik sat down next to it, taking in the view along with it. Minutes went by without another word uttered between the two.

  “Why did we have to fight like that?” Erik eventually asked.

  “I do not know. It is part of the symbiotic retionship between spirit and non-spirit. It is as it always has been,” it said.

  “You don’t have a say in how it pys out?”

  “None. It is an instinct too powerful to resist. I bear no ill intention. Our bond was strong.”

  “What does that really mean, though? I felt the power of the link between us, but what difference does a weaker link make?”

  “Hard to say. Spirits joined to a non-spirit never return to the nd. Spirits you find have never known different,” Leviathan expined calmly, looking down the rushing waterfall. “Where does it go once it’s full?”

  Erik chuckled. He’d been wondering the same thing since he realised it was filling his ocean.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “It is… odd. But beautiful,” it said, looking back up.

  “It is. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel like it’s mine.”

  The creature looked at Erik’s contemptive face in wonder. Another few minutes went by in silence. Then Erik got up to his feet.

  “I better get back to it. This pce won’t fill itself with wondrous and odd things, right?”

  “Are you sure? Rest is important. You don’t know what the next tribution will be,” Leviathan said with a worried tone.

  “You may be right. I have to get stronger, though. My world won’t save itself. Not for ck of trying,” Erik compined. The creature looked around, seeing no danger to the man’s world.

  “There are other ways of gaining strength than rushing off into the void,” it eventually said, disregarding his comment about saving the world. Erik froze for a second.

  “Do you have a way in mind?”

  “Of course,” it said, getting back up at its feet. “Join me,” it continued as it vanished.

  It took Erik a short second to ignore his manifested eyes’ limited vision, but he quickly found the beast on the isnd in the middle of the sea. In a fsh, he was standing in front of the beast once more.

  They were both facing each other now. Erik saw the pink and orange sheen of Sovereign some distance behind Leviathan, along with a bulkier, also humanoid shape.

  This one had two spikes sticking out of its back half a metre or so, and had a much rger cloak billowing in the imaginary breeze than Sovereign did. It was entirely red, with bck streaks, just like the first few times he’d seen it. That was his Core spirit.

  He didn’t know if there was a difference between the spirits he absorbed and his Core spirit. It had to come from somewhere, right? Or she, despite her rger stature, according to Sovereign.

  “Give me a moment, Levvie,” Erik said, vanishing from the sight of the four-legged spirit, immediately appearing in front of the two humanoid ones.

  “Sovereign,” Erik greeted, nodding at the spirit. Erik looked to the other one, now seeing that the rger stature resembled a full pte-armour body from top to toe. “Hello.”

  “Greetings… Erik,” Sovereign said with a slight bow. It seemed he had difficulty resisting the formalities Erik wanted no part of.

  The red spirit nodded deeply in response, but said nothing.

  “Can you speak? Do you have a name?” Erik asked.

  “Cross Vigor,” a feminine yet hollow voice echoed from within the armour.

  “Cross..? As in ‘Carry the Cross’?” Erik asked, remembering the few phrases uttered from the bck-streaked red form earlier.

  “Behold, the Titan who carries the Cross is reborn,” Cross said in a well-practised manner.

  “Those are the words you tried telling me earlier? What do they mean?”

  Cross confirmed with a nod, but said nothing more.

  “Right. Are you feeling okay? Sovereign said you were hurt or, uh… something? I’m sorry for hurting you,” Erik said, looking up at the taller spirit. He could only guess where her eyes were supposed to be, if she had any.

  “I am fine now,” she said.

  “Great. I see you’re not very talkative, but we should have words sometime. Take care," Erik said, poofing away towards Leviathan.

  “Are you ready?” it asked.

  “Ready for what, exactly?” Erik answered questioningly, as he hadn’t been expined what they were doing here.

  “To fight, of course!” the creature said as it leapt towards Erik, its mouth turning into a massive maw with saw-like teeth whirring around inside the mouth. Erik gasped, and teleported away.

  “What the hell?” he yelled at the beast from ten metres or so behind it.

  “No teleporting. This is training!” it replied with a roar.

  Its two front legs turned into giant pincers cruising straight towards Erik, only connected to Leviathan’s main body through thin, bck tendrils.

  Erik dodged left, then right, barely escaping both. He dashed towards the shapeshifting creature from in between the tendrils, but the tendrils snapped, forming small snake-like mouths that chased him.

  They criss-crossed around, and instead of getting tied together by the tendrils, the bck strings simply phased between one another. One of the mouths snapped to the side as its thread grew taut, crashing into Erik’s side with whip-like force. Erik lost his footing, and the second mouth went in for the kill.

  It bit him in the shoulder, grabbing him tightly with its sharp teeth penetrating deep. It lifted him up into the air and tossed him backwards, Erik ending up further away from the Leviathan than he started.

  “Fuck!” Erik said, gripping his wounded shoulder in pain. The pain he could handle, but he hated losing.

  “I said not to teleport, not to avoid your powers. Maybe you should start with Sovereign. I didn’t expect you to still be so weak,” Leviathan said. He wasn’t acting anything at all like he had earlier. Erik chuckled in response.

  “I know what you’re doing, and I hate that it works,” he ughed, getting ready for another round. This time, Erik had a better sense of the rules, and most importantly, he was ready.

  Leviathan Caress shot out his forelegs, turning them into pincers once more. Erik dodged to the right, getting on the outside of Leviathan’s reach this time. Erik dashed as fast as he could closer to Leviathan, but had to duck and roll as the creature flung one of his pincers to the side as he retracted them, his left one flying straight above Erik’s head.

  Erik manifested a pebble in his hand, and threw it at the creature. The creature knocked it away easily with one of the tendrils, not even the main shape of its altered legs. Erik soon held a stick in his hand, and shot forth the grey goo.

  As Leviathan tried knocking the substance aside once more, some of it stuck to the shadowy tendril. The substance hardened after Erik dodged a few swipes, the tendril falling limp from the point it was stuck and outwards.

  Erik threw a frisbee with his right hand, immediately followed by a handful of screws with his left. The one pincer remaining tried to knock the frisbee away, but it had already been activated. The rge limb crashed into nothing, and was instead knocked away.

  The screws, completely unaffected by the wall, headed straight for Leviathan. The creature cut off its glued appendage with nothing but a thought, and whipped the shorter tendril towards the screws. Erik had to activate them before they reached his target. A bright blue psma cage floated in front of Leviathan a moment ter, but it didn’t reach him.

  The creature growled as Erik noticed the pincer fnking him, having been stretched around the invisible wall. The man threw himself out of the way of the giant appendage, and Leviathan missed his target by an inch. Then, the appendage, and the loose, unshaped tendril both fell limp at once as the air filled with a boom as a hidden pebble hit its target.

  Erik took the chance to sprint through his shield, jumping on top of his stunned adversary and raising his fist to the creature’s face.

  Erik waited for the beast to return to his senses. No need to beat the spirit up when training, he figured. Leviathan woke up a few seconds ter. He shook his head, then saw Erik’s fist and face above him.

  “Good. At least you have potential. You use Cross well,” the beast said, giving a toothy grin. “But it’s not enough!” the beast continued, shaking its entire body to throw Erik off of it.

  It struggled for naught, however. When it realised it was constrained somehow, it turned its head to look down at its own body, struggling even to do that. Most of its body was covered in hardened concrete.

  “Enough?” Erik asked with a simir grin.

  “Indeed,” Leviathan answered. Erik thought the concrete away from the spirit, who got up on its now normal feet. “Next time I won’t go so easy on you,” it said.

  “Oh, sore loser, are you?” Erik asked.

  “I liked the fact you threw that stone along with the small metal things. Had I wanted to, however, I could have easily dodged,” it said, and Erik believed it. He thought back, and the creature hadn’t even moved an inch the second match. It was possible it couldn’t when attacking with its forelegs, but Erikdidn’t think that was it.

  He looked over the creature with suspicious eyes. Leviathan then instantly turned into an enormous beast, much more resembling the Leviathan Erik had fought during the absorption, not just in size, but also form. It was easily fifty stories tall in its current form, and the ground shook just from its breathing. A moment ter, the creature returned to normal, as Erik wanted to call it.

  “Good, uhm… boy? Do you have a sex?” Erik considered, btantly ignoring the st few seconds, for his own piece of mind if nothing else.

  “I can be considered… male,” it said, almost tasting the word.

  So, good boy,” Erik repeated, scratching the creature’s chin. A low rumble sounded from the creature, but its eyes were smiling. He was a good boy.