The tooth worm barreled up the surface of the mountain, its absurdly long body skidding and crashing against the rock as it went. Hanging there, Eik didn’t have nearly the maneuverability that he normally enjoyed and thus no good way to avoid the worm’s advance.

  Furthermore, with the person above whose attack seemed to be close to finishing its charging phase. At second glance, the projectile that had caused his entire back to explode into searing pain wasn’t actually made of light nor fire.

  What the person now held in their hand was an ordinary spear, to the degree that a weapon made of alien metals and potentially magical enchantments, around which a glowing energy was forming like a coating.

  It wasn’t uncommon for weapon-focused skill sets to get the options for a charged attack like that. Sonja’s boosted arrow was no different. That likely meant that whoever it was up there would also be a formidable opponent with the spear in melee combat.

  Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Eik began to scramble upward, his eyes never leaving the figure preparing to hurl down a spear. At the distance, Eik could just barely make out the spear as it began to spin around its own axis. The person raised a hand as the spear came to rest in a practiced grip, Eik somehow climbing even faster than he had already done.

  With a roar, the figure threw the spear at Eik at even greater velocity than the first. Only the flicker and blink of the movement alerted Eik to the incoming projectile as he dove into one of the tunnels, desperately hoping that the Norns hadn’t decided to put another tooth worm just inside the opening.

  They didn’t disappoint and he slid inside just as the spear blazed by with a high pitched screech. He gasped ragged breaths as he lay there, staring out across the canopies of the vast forest, sure that there was something very important that he’d forgotten about.

  In the next second the worm appeared and angled outward to get a direct entry into the tunnel Eik was hiding in.

  Oh, right. That.

  On instinct, a copious amount of Profound Toxin flowed out from every pore in his skin, liquid and mist alike, seeping out toward the opening. The sun was blocked out as the worm entered with fury, noises of its thrashing against the tunnel walls deafening. Eik scrambled backward in a crab walk in the narrow passage but the worm, literally evolved to move in here, reached him in less than a second.

  Its maw opened wide as it moved in for the kill, but Eik wasn’t ready to die just yet. Reaching for Toxic Liquefaction, Eik turned to poison and entered the beast’s mouth. The moment he was past the multiple rows of razor sharp teeth, he reverted to his human form and plunged the wakizashi blade into the soft tissue of its throat, or wherever in its body he was.

  It howled, agonized and enraged, but didn’t slow down whatsoever. Unbothered by the pitch blackness of the tunnels, it raced through the mountain like a metro on underground train tracks. Within seconds the blade began to slide out of the wound, too sharp to not cut through the flesh completely.

  Overwhelmed by the rancid stench of stomach acids and what he assumed to be half-digested animal parts, Eik fell further down its seemingly endless gullet. After several futile attempts to get the short blade to bite properly once more, he finally managed to stop his descent.

  Improvising, he conjured two sharp spike of Profound Toxin — one from each of his shoulders respectively. Although not exactly formidable weapons on their own, he managed to get them to penetrate the lining deep enough to secure him in place with some confidence.

  He had never stopped the release of his liquid toxin for even a second since being swallowed and finally it began to show. Judging by the internal movements of the worm it was clearly slowing down. A low keening rose up from further down. He didn’t seem to have passed through anything like an esophageal sphincter so sound must be produced deep inside its body. Alien biology indeed.

  Lying there, stuck inside the stomach of this long-ass sausage thing, he was struck by a sense of deja vu. Wonderful. Maybe this was a good chance to start scrap booking. Fuckin’ hell.

  As the worm came to a stop, it began to deflate, trapping him even tighter. The inside of the tunnels had already been quite cramped, but with this oversized sleeping bag surrounding his body, there was hardly any room to move at all. Getting out was going to be a monumental task, not to mention time-consuming and claustrophobia-inducing. And there really wasn’t time for that kind of nonsense if he was still to make it through this first challenge with a passing score.

  For the briefest of moments he wondered how Sonja might get out of a pickle like this but quickly concluded that she would probably be able to come up with a more reasonable solution than the one that had just taken shape inside his head.

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  “Gods, am I really doing this…?” he muttered to himself as a shaft of solid toxin materialized from his palm and began to grow downward, further into the worm’s depths. More than anything, he was just grateful that his friends couldn’t see him right now.

  ***

  “Again,” Heath said, throwing his hands into the air with animated exasperation. “what the hell is this guy doing? It looks like he’s pooping out a big blue log right now.”

  “This is just a guess, but,” Michael said slowly, watching the spectacle of Eik’s face distorted in deep and tense concentration, lit up only by the glow of the Profound Toxin flowing all around him. “I don’t think Eik knows that we can see him.”

  Next to them, Mikla gasped. “Oh, crap.”

  “What?” Heath asked.

  “I think I forgot to tell him.”

  “That his pooping face is being broadcast to the entire population of an inter dimensional super alliance?” Heath asked.

  “Yeah… He’s going to be so mad, isn’t he?”

  “He’s not actually pooping right now, guys,” Michael clarified. “He was before though. You know, when he was squatting down behind those bushes. And, if he’d known we can see him, he would probably not have dropped his pants all the way to his ankles when he stopped for a pee earlier either.”

  “Oh, man,” Mikla sighed, face in his hands.

  “But yeah, he’s definitely going to be mad.”

  “What’s he even planning to do?” Sonja asked.

  They all stared as Eik began to sweat. “I… I don’t…”

  ***

  This was hard. Eik was working with solid toxin at a size he’d never even gotten close to creating before. Normally small spikes or compact shields was all he really needed to get the job done and so that was also mostly what he had practiced.

  A stupidly long length like this was just not something he’d foreseen ever needing. Something like this wasn’t possible to just conjure up on the fly. As it grew, so did the difficulty of keeping it intact intensify.

  At first it was a piece of cake, but soon sweat broke out on his forehead at the mental strain of the task. But he refused to stop until he reached his absolute limit. For what he had in mind, he was pretty sure it was a case of the bigger the better.

  After almost two minutes of growing, the shaft of blue seemed to have reached what he could realistically expect. It was embedded in the worm’s flesh to make sure that it would react in the way he wanted it to. He’d also extracted all toxin before it had succumbed completely, so although it was no longer conscious, it was technically still alive.

  It was at least three or four times longer than the one he had planted in the neck of the amphibian monster in the damage test of the Crucible. Dragging it all the way to the opening of the worm’s mouth took some work as well. Finally ready to set his plan in motion, hesitation and doubt took a firm hold of him.

  “Aah, craaaaap,” he breathed, resisting the urge to bite his nails. “Fuck it!” he muttered resolutely and curled up into a ball with a finger resting on the surface of the blue log. A few deep breaths and he was ready.

  The Unified Mass was a place governed by willpower, hope, hard work, and, most of all, creativity and ingenuity. And if the stupid-ass stunt he was about to pull wasn’t creative, then somebody had better rewrite the damn dictionary. This was going to work exactly because it was dumb and crazy. That made sense, right?

  Clenching his eyes shut in the hope that it would alleviate some of the anxiety, Eik first enveloped himself in a skin tight coating of solid toxin. Then he pushed it to expand further until his curled up body sat inside a compact, round sphere.

  “Alright, here goes,” he muttered, the sound of his voice hollow in the enclosed space. “Accelerant.”

  He couldn’t see what was going on, but he could certainly feel it. It was magnificent.

  The moment the shaft detonated, all of Eik’s organs were pushed into his feet as the force of the resulting shock wave, contained within the narrow space of the passage, sent the sphere enveloping him rocketing through the tunnel like a pin ball shot by a sniper rifle.

  The gravelly racket as the sphere ripped rock from the wall in its passing reverberated in his ears. For several seconds he shot through the tunnels at breakneck speed, completely oblivious to direction and control. More than anything he wanted to release the sphere and be free, but he still felt it ricochet against the walls, the occasional unfortunate angle breaking off a fragment of his protective barrier which he quickly reformed.

  It couldn’t be long now.

  And then, after what felt like an hour of cramped, anxious tumbling worse than the first time he had traveled by fracture, he was suddenly in free fall. Curled up inside the toxic sphere, sailing through the air almost made him feel weightless.

  Like the tail of a blue comet, liquid trailed his flight as he released the solid poison. Immediately, he conjured a pair of gliding wings and entered a soft curve as he turned back toward the mountain he’d finally come out of.

  Dust and debris billowed out of the tunnel openings all over the rock face, a testament to a level of destruction far beyond what Eik had intended or expected to cause.

  “Suck it!” he roared with adrenaline-driven glee but then quickly swerved off to the side, the abysmal maneuverability of his gliding wings only barely allowing him to avoid a thrown spear aimed to take off his head. “Motherf—”

  A second spear was launched from the top of the mountain in quick succession and Eik had to release the wings and enter a steep dive to avoid being impaled. Passing heat almost singed the hairs on his neck as he reformed the toxic construction and resumed the rapid approach to the rock face.

  Catching himself on all fours, Eik snarled as he shot up toward the peak, the flames of his anger stoked further by the wordless voice inside his head. Whoever it was up there harassing him was about to drown in a sea of poi—

  Huh?

  Something felt off. It was a little too easy to run up this damn mountain.

  Eik risked a quick glance down only to find that “down” seemed to be a bit more horizontal than he recalled.

  “Oh… fuck.”

  The whole damn thing was crumbling under him.

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