A storm of jelly flew his way as 199 man’o’wars jumped out of the ocean with movements that their bodies should not have supported. This happened all so suddenly that only Sylph reacted in time, but her wind failed in doing much more than disperse the cloud a little bit.

John became subject to the disgusting experience of looking at several hundred kilos of jelly splashing against his Mana Protection like flies against a windshield. Stacking on the small ship or bouncing right back into the ocean, only the fewest of the bunch actually took any damage from that action whatsoever.

Interested, John, who felt in no way threatened, reached out of his protection. As to how he did that, it wasn’t that hard. Because Mana Protection was a fixed circle around him, trying to simply punch or pick up anything outside it that was registered as an enemy (which was basically everything animated outside of his group), was impossible. How did he fix that? Well, higher Intellect and Wisdom levels allowed for easier and easier control of the bubble’s form. He couldn’t expand it, but he could temporarily bend it inwards to allowed him to grab something outside of it without the skill going off.

Thus, the Gamer reached for one of the regenerating specimens that had landed on the ship. ‘It seems he is healing through energy from his uninjured comrades,’ John thought and then was hit by a mildly unpleasant prickling in his left arm. One of the Jelly colonies had wrapped a tentacle around him. Many more soon did the same.

‘Okay, yes, I get it!’ John thought as Purgatory engulfed his left hand in fire. With that protected limb, he simply cut and ripped off the tentacles holding onto his right. As he shook that hand to get rid of the sticky remains, the Colonies that had landed on the boat around him were now trying their best to jump off as quickly as possible, likely afraid of the display of fire.

“That should have knocked him out flat!” Junior screamed in the background, interrupting his own triumphant laughter. “His body is filled with poison!”

“Sorry, but I play by other rules than everyone else, at least in this aspect,” John grabbed one of the Jelly Colonies trying to get off with his left and squished the soft body. It was like squeezing a cushion, the clawed gauntlet cutting trenches into the jellyr and ultimately crushing the whole thing with ease.

“NOOOOOOOO, JEREMYYYYYYY!” Junior cried out, his giant hat tipping as he gestured wildly. In a flurry of motions, he both pointed at John and kept his hat in place, “You will pay for that.”

“HAH, the loss of one of these guys bothers you already?” Salamander’s voice came from above, shifting their attention to her. The endflame elemental was condensing power between her raised hands. The new flames, probably the name giving endflame (as edgy as that was), was the normal gold at the centre but surrounded by a mantle of grey instead of crimson red. Overall it looked quite menacing.

“Salamander, no!” John cried out, who could see something that was horribly overkill.

“Salamander, YES!” she screamed back with a wild smile, the same fire breaking out of the dense network of lines surrounding her left eye as she hurled her arms downwards. The condensed ball became a cone and set the air on fire as it travelled downward.

John did the only sensible thing and jumped overboard and into the water. The ocean did him a favour in the shape of one of its elementals, Undine, stretching a wave out to him to encapsulate him before the fire hit.

He could feel the heat boil away the surface of the ocean behind him. Undine making sure that the bubble of air she had caught with him remained in placed by stretching her own slime body around him. Things above turned into a obscuring steam cloud, so he was temporarily blinded for what was going on up there.

Down here, however, he saw all of the Jelly Colonies that had made it out. They made their ways over to their hurt or pretty crispy looking fellows. Salamander’s attack had dealt a lot of damage, predictably, but for level 30 to 40 creatures, these things were really durable. No, that was the wrong way to put it, they were actually weak to damage, it was just that they had an annoying healing mechanic.

Undine carried John back to the safety vessel. No matter how enchanted, this thing was slowly seeing the effects of hanging around John, with the dragon claw and now burn marks that covered it. The damage looked worse than it actually was though, the thing still floated.

John wiped the saltwater off his face and looked over to the enemy ship, where Junior was standing straddle-legged with his arms crossed behind a barrier. “Muahahahaha, my army is invincible,” Junior said. “I was just baiting you into attacking them to exhaust your power.”

“Salamander, how often can you repeat that attack?” John just asked the flying endflame elemental.

“Three, four times without pause? I need the time to charge it though,” Salamander answered.

“Okay,” John used Shardbound and united all of the energy into one, hurling it straight at the barrier. A shockwave went through the blue bubble, looking much like John’s own Mana Protection. The Gamer hummed as he thought about this.

“As you can clearly see, this fight is useless,” Susie chimed in. “Junior is our fighting expert! Just give us Captain Boss Senior back and we will be on our way.”

“Audible gasp, John, we cannot win, what do we do?” Sylph landed on their boat and then dramatically collapsed at his side. “After all the things we have won against, like, uhm, an insect with a mane and that weird maggot thing and, uh, those invisible stuffs,” she was clearly trying, and failing, to remember any of those names, “and ‘member Huan?”

John just skipped the question who Huan was supposed to be and spoke up about the actual situation at hand. “Relax we are going to win,” he told her. “In one of three ways,” he conjured another Shardbound and hurled it at the shield. He was now down to half his mana, so, even though he still had buffer in the pre-charge of Mana Protection, he was ready to stop casting there. However, there was Purgatory’s buff, which was about to max out. Apparently boiling away part of the ocean was a good way to get that up. So he threw one more and thus was down to a quarter of his mana. “Way number one, they are right and we enter a stalemate.” Purgatory ignited, he hurled the fireball at some healed up Jelly Colonies whose sails peaked out of the water. “As long as we have what they want and not vice versa, we win so, unless they have an infiltration force strong enough to beat who we left in front of the cell.”

“Uhm,” Susie, clearly the brains of this operation, did not like that John was calmly dismantling their bluff in front of her.

“Way number two, there is NO way that these colonies have enough mana to heal each other up forever. Eventually they are going to die. If that is somehow not the case, they still need time to heal each other. Push comes to shove, we are getting Dendepthr out and then they can take it up with that monster.”

‘I would dislike that,’ Undine mentally commented, the words doing no justice to the pure wave of disdain she had for her fusion with Stirwin, which was a cold-hearted killing machine in the form of a prehistoric dinosaur being infused with crocodile DNA. Because, wasn’t one of these things not dangerous enough on its own?

‘Literally everyone would dislike that, but that’s an easy way to victory,’ John told her. “Anyway, way three, what is true for the Colonies is true for that barrier as well. If we make this a war of attrition, there is no way you can refill the barrier as much as I can damage it,” he gestured for Salamander to change into her item form to help him in this endeavour, “meaning that, once I get your pre-saved mana depleted, which really can’t be too much – I would guess about ten-thousand Maybel tops – I win. If you bluff,” Salamander was now close enough, her body becoming a mass of red energy that wrapped around her summoner’s arm, “at least make it believable.”

Salamander’s item form was, much like Undine’s, a glove. However, where Undine was a layer of blue, latex-like material that form-fitted to John’s hand, Salamander had more similarity to Purgatory. It was a plate-scaled gauntlet, many small chips of metal overlapping to form a protective case from the elbow downwards. Most of the gauntlet was of a dark red, but a multitude of black scales created a lined pattern akin to the one on Salamander’s skin. The hand segment had those lines where John’s sinews would be underneath, the middle of each finger had a thin black line on top, ending in the final segment, clawed as so often, being completely the colour of coal.

“So, what do you think?” John asked and engaged in a little dirty synergy between Purgatory and Salamander’s item form. Once the fire on Purgatory re-ignited, he could siphon and store it as a fireball with Salamander’s help. Sure, it wasn’t the strongest thing in the world, but he could repeat that every 10 seconds. “Do you want to just give up right now or how do you want to play this?”

Junior’s tentacles quivered as he thought, long and hard, about that proposal. “ALL COLONIES RETURN TO SHIP!” he finally shouted.

John took that as a sign that he had won, but the ensuing dialogue proved him otherwise.

“You can’t possibly mean…” Susie sounded dumbfounded, with wide eyes she looked at Junior as he pulled off his leather coat and hat, handing both over to her.

“Take care of these for me,” he said in the voice of the hero.

‘Does that make me the villain in this situation?’ John asked himself, wearing two evil-looking clawed gauntlets, a rich-person’s suit and keeping a son from saving his father. ‘Well, maybe a bit, but they got themselves into this mess.’

Junior jumped off his ship and into the mass of Jelly Colonies below. “Behold!” his voice gargled from below after a short wait. “The true power of symbiotic organisms!”

‘Shouldn’t we be stopping that?’ Undine asked. ‘He is absolutely vulnerable right now.’

‘But where would be the fun in that?’ Salamander returned.

‘Sooo, I kinda wanna have a fight that’s actually a fight, like, a challenge or something or whatever gives me a marshmallow by the end of it, is that alright? Is that that?’ Sylph sounded like she was on Salamander’s side there.

‘I can do either, so I guess we are waiting for this to happen,’ the final decision was made by John, and thus they stood there in anticipation.

From the Jelly Colonies and Captain Boss Junior formed a new lifeform. It seemed that Junior was some sort of biomancer, at least that was the only explanation for how he included himself in what rose from the waves: a bloated body of jelly of dark blue colour, with hard plates covering much of its elastic form. The many poisonous tentacles of the individuals that made up this being were braided together into just four, which made up the arms.

It was all upper body; underneath the water Undine only spied a small umbrella that kept the whole thing floating. John narrowed his eyes and saw the captain somewhere in the middle of that thing, his body still and his head inside a dome of gelatine.

“Now we can fight equally!” he announced, his voice getting gargled out through the swinging of the sail-like outgrowths on the thing’s massive shoulders.

“This is going to be interesting at least,” John shouted back and jumped off the safety vessel as a giant tentacle came for him. It smashed right through the already tortured boat, scattering plastic and metal over the nearby area. ‘Thank you, Jesus, for your gifts,’ he thought as he ran over the water and unloaded all of the fire he had saved up in his right over the past minute.

The flaming strike hit the Behemoth on the shoulder, causing the jelly to dry out. A moment later it began to inflate again, water being pumped up from the umbrella below. “Words cannot describe how dull I find regenerators,” John screamed out and went over his strategy very quickly. He only had less than 2 minutes to decide this fight before his water-walk ran out. It was time engage in some more strong attacks.

‘Ready to unleash?’ he asked Salamander.

‘What do you think? I am just waiting for you to get off your ass and cast something!’ came the joyful voice of his fire spirit.

John pooled the rest of his mana into Shardbound as he kept running. As per usual, they spawned as four individual shards above his shoulders. They combined into one above his right hand.

“I will get you… eventually!” Junior enthusiastically lashed at John, who was just waiting for the guy to make a mistake. That moment came when John had circled the Behemoth far enough that only his right tentacles could reach him. So when Junior used both of those to lash at John at once, that was his chance.

‘Undine, Sylph, go!’ he mentally screamed. Undine used her own body to block one of the tentacles while the tempest elemental provided a jumping John with enough tailwind that he was able to sail right over the horizontal swipe. Up there in the air, John took aim.

‘My turn,’ Salamander’s voice was one of a voracious hunter, ready for some new meat. The light purple crystal over John’s upwards pointing palm suddenly became golden, and a grey fire surrounded it. Then he fired it, the spell moving much more quickly than usual.

The sharp shard ripped right through the body of the Behemoth and left behind a tunnel. A tunnel which was burning with that golden, grey fire at the walls, fire that wasn’t put out by any regenerating factor.

“Ow, what’s that, OW!” Junior screamed as the fire dug in deeper.

Salamander’s unleash was a damage cooldown, to put it simply. Every minute she could empower one spell of an ally. Her unleashing wasn’t a thing that fit the hot-headed character, being entirely dependant on other people. Still, it was powerful, and everything that forced her to be a bit more of a team player was fine by John.

Junior, despite being in pain through sharing a body with the now innerly burning Behemoth, was not ready to give up. While himself unharmed, John had purposefully aimed away from the octopus-man, the amount of conviction he had for the matter was still admirable. The previously blocked tentacles now stretched for John again.

John felt the air on his right hand again as Salamander transformed back. “Fine, give me something more to do!” she shouted out and caught one of the tentacles between her hands. John had the luxury of Mana Protection, the defensive skill’s buffer getting finally smashed by that last attack. While that left him without defences or mana, it also stopped the attack and allowed him to land on the unsteady surface of the ocean.

The thing with Salamander evolving wasn’t just her new abilities, it also had filled a certain hole in her Stats. “I am going to punch you, really fucking hard!” she shouted with clenched fists engulfed in grey as she took a lash and then flew up close to finish the guy off.

Whether it was just a natural weak point or if the stress the burning hole in the Behemoth’s body caused was lowering his bodies surface tension, Salamander managed to ram her hands into the dome that was protecting Junior and ripped it open. She reached inside, grabbed Junior by the tentacles of his beard and then pulled.

Panicked, all four arms of the Behemoth lashed at her, hitting her all over her flaming form. The more she exerted herself, the more pronounced the flame around her left eye became. The hole that had been fixed was her Endurance, being previously in a state that made her a glass cannon. Now she was more of an offensively weighed all-rounder, allowing her to pull off stunts in melee as well as ranged situations.

With a wet squelching sound, Junior was finally pulled out of the Behemoth, who exploded into the Jelly Colonies that made it up at that point. Salamander whirled him around by the tentacle beard two times and then smashed him against his own ship’s one-way barrier.

“Junior!” Susie did the only sensible thing and lowered the barrier to get the tentacled fellow back on board. John took that opportunity to have Sylph and Salamander carry him onto the ship as well. He would have just run, but by now the buff had ended. “Are you okay?” She turned to John when he didn’t react, “You monster!”

“Relax, nobody turned him into calamari,” John tried to calm her down.

“Yet,” Salamander added with a cackle.

“What I am saying is that he is still alive and largely unharmed. Do I need to remind you that it was you who attacked us? Also, can you admit that the molestation accusation was a hoax? I really don’t like being accused of things I didn’t do.”

“I mean, yes it was, I just say that to get Junior into a fighting mood, it works every time,” Susie admitted rather easily.

“Well, it is a bitch move every time,” John said, now feeling way less guilty about the ultimatum he was about to put forward. There was just a major difference between taking from those with different morals and those who were morally bankrupt.