My raccoon belly filled again and again and again. Part of each burroworm was still underground, but thanks to there being two corpses, I didn’t have to dig them up much in order to reach my target.

  

   profile 100% complete. Added to [Amalgamation]’s Loadout options.

  Curious, I checked what parts of my Loadout could switch to . Only the head, body, and tail had the option, and I couldn’t actually make the switch given my limited stored mass, though I didn’t actually want to. What I wanted was the skills attached to the profile.

  There were three, and all of them seemed good. [Tremor Sense] was what allowed the burroworms to feel vibrations in the earth to target their prey. [Earth Tunneling] allowed the burroworm to swim through the soft soil of the forest.

  The real winner was the third, the one I had heard adventurers mention: [Stone Bullet], which let the burroworm shoot a magical rock as a projectile attack.

  I NEED IT, I screamed internally. But for that, I need a level.

  The fastest way to get a level was to kill a comparably powerful creature, but animal levels seemed to roughly scale with their size, and in order to kill a Level 6 animal, I’d be hunting something larger than me. While I had some success doing that with raccoons, the two I had killed had only been Level 5 and Level 4. Most of the smaller animals I had killed were Level 2 to Level 4. I wasn’t sure what I’d have to fight to find a Level 6, but it would probably be a sizable animal, and that wasn’t an option until after I had my magic projectile attack.

  Monsters might be a better option than animals. Those goblins seemed strong, as did the burroworms. But then, I doubted I could kill those myself, either.

  I’d been Level 6 for a while though, and while I wasn’t killing many strong creatures, I had hunted down a lot of weaker ones. I couldn’t be that far from leveling up. Grinding on weak animals was slow, but surely it would get me there, so—putting some distance between myself and the burroworm territory—I set out in mode to terrorize the creatures of the forest until I achieved my goal of reaching Level 7.

  It was a random low-level rabbit that tipped me over my goal.

  

   (Level 3) defeated. Reduced experience gained.

  Level up! You have reached Level 7.

  You have earned an attribute upgrade and a skill point.

  I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my skill point, but my attribute upgrade was a trickier decision. I had gone back and forth debating it, my main choice constantly updating to my new circumstances.

  With and enough stored mass to toggle forms regularly, maxing out my 10,000g of stored mass was actually very feasible. In fact, I was maxed out at that very moment, after binging on the burroworms. That meant acquiring larger profiles was on the table, which would improve my overall combat performance, assuming I was relying on brute strength.

  With [Stone Bullet], however, I could focus on agility and sniping. For that, staying airborne was key, but fighting as a bird was limiting in a lot of ways. My speed and talons were both great, a larger and stronger jaw would make my biting attacks a lot more powerful. Having actual arms would be a huge boon, as well.

  My speed and agility mostly came from [Flight (Major)], though. The skill seemed more important than aerodynamics, since no skill was entirely biological. I didn’t have the same hardware as a bat to use [Bio Sonar] as a falcon, and yet I could. So even if I was a raccoon with wings, [Flight (Major)] would likely keep me airborne.

  The issue with that was the size difference in the Loadout fields. Every time I used my raccoon body to eat, I still had my falcon wings active, since I couldn’t turn that off, so naturally I had tried to fly like that.

  It was… absurdly painful. My wings felt like they were going to tear off my body, very much like the pain I had felt in the early days of mixing with larger body parts.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  If I want to mix and match, I need to pick up that scaling factor upgrade. It’s only going to get worse if I keep picking up more mass and larger profiles.

  There was also the two attributes I had been ignoring. I could upgrade [Bound Soul] and [Time Loop], and I was exceptionally curious about both, but I was worried that I’d be wasting the upgrade on an unknown that wouldn’t enhance my combat power. As had been the case so far, they would have to wait until I was better situated to grind more levels.

  Scale factor first. Then another storage upgrade at Level 8, probably, which if the pattern holds will take me from 10kg to 100kg, which is more than enough for the foreseeable future. After that, I can experiment.

  

  

  Level: 7

  Attributes: [Amalgamation (2)][Bound Soul][Chimaeric Core (4)][Time Loop]

  Skills: [Bio Sonar][Flight (Major)][Hyper Vision][Mighty Leap][Stone Bullet][Venomous Bite]

  I pulled up my Loadout to see what had changed.

  

  Head:

  Body(?):

  Limbs:

  Tail:

  Wings:

  I tapped the scale icon, and saw that I was able to switch it from the Body field to any of the fields that I wished. Okay, well, let’s try changing something…

  

  Tail: →

  My scorpion tail was my original weapon, but the larger I got the less useful it was. It didn’t hurt all that much to equip with a larger form—mostly it just felt pinched or squeezed, because it was too small—but this time it felt… well, less wrong.

  I looked back and saw my scorpion tail growing out of the back of my falcon body, but bigger.

  Twice as big, I’d guess. So that’s how scaling factor works.

  If I was understanding it correctly, whatever Loadout field I set as my dominant one with the scale icon would be the profile my scaling factor worked around. Whatever I set to the other fields would attempt to scale the profile to match, limited—for now—to half the normal size to double the normal size.

  The scorpion tail was too small for the falcon body, so it hit the limit of the scale factor prematurely. But if the scale factor doubled again with another upgrade, it would be a rather intimidating additional weapon on a creature this size.

  Likewise, given the size of the raccoon, even double-size falcon wings would probably be tough to fly with. It would take another update or two to reach a break-even point, and a handful of upgrades total to reach peak usefulness: for example, where I could wield a full-size scorpion stinger on a 10kg profile body.

  Let’s get weird with this.

  I didn’t have all that many profiles, and even fewer with useful traits. Mostly those were small profiles, and double scaling wouldn’t be enough.

  With [Stone Bullet], though, I wanted to make myself a smaller target. For that, I wanted erratic flight, so I would be hard to pin down. My best wings for that were probably my wings, but bats were very small, too small for any physical attacks to do anything, and I could only scale the wings up twice that size.

  Even my body would be too large, then, to make use of bat wings.

  Glancing through my smaller rodent profiles, I paused on . Small, but quick and mobile, as opposed to . Larger and sturdier than itself, but not so much so as to render the wings useless; the , by comparison, was just a bit too big.

  The weight might have been an issue with [Flight (Minor)], but with [Flight (Major)], I didn’t foresee a problem.

  I haven’t actually used yet, I just picked it up while I was eating small animals after first escaping the tower. That could work.

  The rest fell into place fairly naturally.

  

  Head:

  Body(?):

  Limbs:

  Tail:

  Wings:

  Four profiles was a new record for me, but unlike previous attempts to push myself, this was significantly more comfortable thanks to scaling factor. I had been temped to go with an alternate set of limbs just to have a different profile for every field, but there wasn’t really an amazing choice for limbs, so I went with the ones which would be most comfortable for the body and still let my climb surfaces and grasp things.

  Tiny falcon talons would have been amazing, but even at half-size, they’d be too large. And starling and sparrow limbs weren’t anywhere near as good as weapons, plus I’d lose out on having arms.

  I had run a similar build, with across body and limbs, in the past, but that was before scaling. gave me some more size, made me a little more durable.

  Really, I need another upgrade for scaling factor, but it will do. Let’s try this out. [Flight]!

  Some aerial experimentation later, I confirmed that I was a zippy little monster. As predicted, the Major upgrade covered my bases for flying with the bat wings, which helped me tremendously if I needed to deke in mid-air. Having a stinger to jab with and a bigger lizard mouth to bite with was probably slightly less helpful at this size, but would have been amazing a few levels back.

  All that eating and practice burned daylight, and soon dusk was setting in, so I made my way towards the goblin nest.

  Lets see if I can kill one of these little bastards.

  huge boost for the story's rank. It's appearing on six genre lists now but hasn't quite managed to get onto Rising Stars, and your review might be just what it needs to start that climb! I appreciate you!