“Give!” Stirwin’s cutely high-pitched voice whimpered in the tone of a pleading kid as he was stretching his head upwards. There were many things a crocodile’s body were built to do: being a bone-crushing killing machine, having the ability to grow endlessly, be armoured with strong scales while also possessing a strong healing factor and be all around a killing machine that didn’t need large evolutionary adjustment since the age of the dinosaurs.

None of these virtues was the ability to stand up on their back legs, and so Stirwin, already having backed as close to the edge as he could, was only able to look at the piece of peeled orange John was holding over his raised head with desire. He could have made a jump for it, but that was a desperate move and likely to end with him just falling off the table after John raised his hand out of reach.

Stirwin was a fish out of the water, which would have been a way more advantageous biome for him to be in. ‘Just good that I can also bait him with fruits and vegetables,’ the Gamer thought, tauntingly wiggling the thing, ‘not like a normal crocodile would be interested in this.’ He lowered the piece of fruit just a little bit to prompt a snapping of the hatchling’s jaws. All Stirwin caught was one of the white pieces that stuck to the sweet orange flesh. Not interested in that thing, he shook his head until it flew away.

“Give!” Stirwin pleaded again, assuming his waiting stance once more. John was experiencing some minor inconvenience in the shape of Nia drumming on his back with weak punches of her one hand while the other was pushing the angry card against his face.

“Don’t bully the croc!” her demand was presented in her usual emotionless tone, but her actions and insistence made John just add a mental exclamation mark. “Tu es une mauvaise personne.” She had just called him an evil person, but as it turned out, that just sounded sexy to his ears. Because it was French. It helped that Nia Fae was a blonde bombshell of a girl.

“I am trying to get him to tell me what he can actually do,” John retorted. “Which is a bit of a challenge with him never using more than one word at a time.”

“Fruit!” Stirwin squealed, and John gave him half of the slice with a sigh, not particularly enjoying torturing the little guy.

“You haven’t seen it yet, so let me show you what I know Chompy can do right now.” After Stirwin had gulped down the sweet piece of fruit meat, John urged him to turn into his item form. He hung the golden egg-shaped accessory from his belt on the silver chain that came with it. Then he conjured a five-hundred mana worth version of Shardbound and had it dart for the sun. He didn’t intend for it to hit anything and thus it simply reached the maximum range and dissipated.

“So, when I use a spell,” John told her and then aimed his hand at the pool, “whatever side of my body I fired it with, the corresponding hand can do this.” A beam of golden light shot at the pool, creating a slight bit of steam but otherwise useless. “It’s a short range, single target, quick attack. Pretty easy to aim with damage directly corresponding to the amount of mana spend on the spell. 10% of mana spent plus 0,5% per level of Elemental Unity, to be exact.” John had almost ran damage experiments on Aclysia, which were always pretty inaccurate, just out of sheer desperation to get some knowledge on what the damage numbers where when he had found that titbit under the passive skills description. An awful place to hide it. “It’s pretty good,” he continued, “from a sheer utility standpoint.”

Of course, this freebie couldn’t even compare to the actual spell John used. At 500 mana, Shardbound did 2735 damage, being his second most damaging spell after Mana Blade for 4790. Meanwhile that light blast did a, comparably pitiful, 25,5% of the mana cost as damage, or 127,5 as an actual number.

But it was free and, much more importantly, was blindingly bright. If he ever found himself in a melee situation throwing one of these into his enemies’ face, it was exactly the kind of crowd control he needed to disengage to his natural habitat further back or just punch someone as hard as he could with his limited close quarter experience. It would also be helpful in other crowd situations, particularly those that involved one strong leader-type boss and many weak goons. It was also important to note that he couldn’t keep multiple of these charged up or stack them, although continuous casting did keep the strongest version of the laser in a fireable state. If he didn’t use any spells for five minutes or unequipped Stirwin, the build-up blast disappeared.

‘Again,’ Stirwin’s insistent voice reached his mental ear. Either the crocodile just liked the sight of that or there was something about to happen. Either way, John lost nothing but a few minutes’ worth of mana regeneration if he obeyed, so he did. ‘Throw!’

Now that was a bit of an unclear command. ‘Throw another attack, throw the laser, throw you?’ he asked.

‘Me! Me!’ with that cleared up, albeit slightly confused, John reached for the egg on his belt. To his surprise, instead of needing to be removed, the egg simply came off the chain as if some adhesive suddenly stopped working. The golden egg in his hand glowed softly; a circle the depth of a shell was where it and the chain had parted, the missing part still attached to his belt.

“Chompy, go?” John made an unsure Pokemon reference and tossed the egg at the pool in an underhand motion. It described a somewhat high arc as the glow was consumed and formed a momentary golden hole in the space it held, out of which Stirwin squeezed like a distorted mass of scales, teeth and claw, all while still flying. It was like watching a dangerous version of a clown car or something rising out of the light distortion of a black hole. By the time he had reached the highest point of the arc, the crocodile had fully formed and did a proper nose dive into the water.

The crocodile had grown out of its thirty-centimetre length hatchling form and was now about a metre in length, swimming by using his flattened tail to propel himself, arms pressed closely against his body while he made his way over the edge of the pool. As was usual for an animal that grew out of the baby stage, his silver eyes were no longer as big in relation to his head as before, and overall the cuteness factor was reduced.

While the colour scheme stayed the same as before, albeit with the bronze dots on his golden hide being darker in colour than before, the scales looked all around thicker and sharper, having these crocodile-typical sharp bumps along the back. The ridges of his tail were flat like a paddle and, with enough force behind the swing, looked like they could cut through skin, muscle and bone all the same. His snout had grown longer, and the teeth were where the differences between a normal crocodile and Stirwin became most apparent.

Like the teeth of a saw, the scales around his mouth protruded over his lips. Segmented into areas where they grew from the upper or lower side of his skull, they would cut apart just about anything that had the unfortunate experience of getting into his maw. At the current size that was an arm that was risk, not the most lethal thing but still nothing anybody in their right mind would want to experience.

When Stirwin had reached the edge of the pool, he pushed his mouth above the surface. The teeth inside were bend inwards and looked surprisingly dull; given that their only purpose was to hold, that was all that was needed, however.

“Now we can speak,” he sounded like a young adult, fitting given his form. “My normal form doesn’t have the mind to formulate proper sentences. Although the mind of a child is easier to maintain.” Stirwin put his front legs over the edge of the pool. They were surprisingly long for a crocodile and possessed a roughly human outline, with four fingers and an opposable thumb. John had the feeling he was dealing less with a crocodile and more with a dragon that had chosen to forego the wings and put all its evolution points into water predator instead.

Then again, what were dragons if not reptiles that had decided to go the winged route? Point being that Stirwin now looked a lot more like a fantasy creature than before. One that was still bound by his biology though, as he had a hard time actually climbing out of the pool.

Claws unable to find anything to hold onto and with a elongated body that wasn’t particularly great at pushing itself over edges, all he could do was give it a strong acceleration in an attempt to get the mass of his body onto land and push from there. The attempt failed, only getting him halfway on land where gravity then wanted him back in the water.

With a panicked, high-pitched squeal, Stirwin slid back until John grabbed him behind the arms and pulled. For a being made out of solidified light, he was pretty heavy, a stark difference to Siena, Salamander and Sylph who all weighed basically nothing. Once his back legs had also made it over the edge, Stirwin was safe and could move on his own. His hind legs were even longer, raising his lower body into a position where his tail was a more effective weapon. Although altogether it didn’t look like he would be a fast runner, even with longer legs than the average crocodile he still had his mass pretty close to the floor.

“Nyahahahaha,” Copernicus laughed at the struggle he had just witnessed, causing Stirwin to hiss challengingly. Unafraid, the suncat jumped off the shaded table he was resting upon and tapped his way over there in that half-running way excited cats used sometimes. “What, is the slow and clumsy lizard angry?” he mocked.

In response the young crocodile opened his mouth and, with a sound like a burning tennis ball launcher, shot plasma right in the suncat’s face. That got a very displeased, deep meow out of the unhurt cat. The two began hissing at each other in their individual way, one with a dangerously opened mouth and the other in a posture ready to pounce. That was a fight Stirwin would still lose every day, as his stat scaling remained garbage, it was just less garbage than before.

Thankfully, the ultimate equalizer came in, in the form of Nia kneeling down at their side and patting them as equals without as much as a single word. That dispelled any aggression there was, for the moment.

“So, you need me to cast spells while in item form to unleash, good to know,” John said after he thought he had waited long enough, “but a thousand mana for you just to reach the first stage?”

“Don’t expect me to be of any real use in fights in the near future,” Stirwin presented the simple truth to him. “You don’t have the mana to feed my higher forms right now.”

“Any rough breakdowns as to what I should expect on that end?” John wanted to know, poking at the part of the crocodile’s belly where it changed into a white colour and looked soft. It was, but only so far as one could say that wood was soft compared to tempered steel.

“I could make the educated guess. Gaia has been nice enough to leave that information in my mind for when I can reach my true form in your modern units,” John wanted to scream at the sky why she didn’t just tell him directly but expected only sass in return.

Yup, that was exactly what he thought he would get.

“One-hundred million mana,” the number caused John to almost keel over and just die from shock.

“Excuse me, did you just say ‘one million mana’?” he asked, kind of hopeful.

“I said one one-hundred million, John,” Stirwin repeated. “I am infinite, we could go even beyond that, but that’s where you would see what I was when you first met me… although I would probably shrink down to fit into whatever cramped reality pocket I am in.”

How would he even use one-hundred million mana worth of spells? That had to be an incredibly long engagement where he was basically allowed to freecast, either that or he had to prepare one-hundred million Maybel worth of mana batteries and carry that around with him somehow. The latter actually sounded like the more likely scenario, which said a lot about the impossibility of this task.

“I should be up to fighting strength somewhere around the one-hundred thousand mark,” Stirwin said as his scales began to flicker at the edges and drift apart like golden ambers. “Ah, my time in this form is up. You should feed me more mana over the threshold, overwise maintaining the form over a prolonged period is difficult.”

“Do you mind being stuck as a hatchling most of the time?” John hastily asked one last thing he wanted to know.

“Not particularly, it’s nice seeing the world as simple,” Stirwin answered, and then his body faded until all that was left was a cutely squeaking, tiny scaled thing being scratched between the eyes by Nia’s wiggling finger. ‘Satisfied?’ the now childish voice asked.

“Yes,” John answered and got in on patting the little crocodile, who happily wagged his tail.