I bolted.

  Eyes stretching wide, the shapeling on the left stopped working the ice javelin and turned to me. Both of its hands bent at the wrist like something you'd see on a human-sized praying mantis. The sharp glint on its edges became even more apparent as its arms rose to meet my figure.

  With a screech so loud it muffled the wind, its feet kicked at the snow, and the demon darted towards me.

  I brought my sword to the side. After just a few steps, we were a mere six feet apart.

  The shapeling let its right arm droop at an angle. It cocked its right shoulder, pushed its weight to its front foot, and bit down as hard as it could.

  Then it swung.

  The blow blurred out the air as it beelined for my neck. One wrong step, and it would shave my head right off.

  So I stopped in my tracks the second I saw that hand come for me.

  The shapeling's hand got close. Much closer than I would've wanted it to. The sharp and unforgiving cold of its clear-blue skin met my forehead from the left, biting into the muscle just shallowly enough that I could almost feel my skull rattle from the hit. The skin tore open, and the demon traced a line from one side of my forehead to the other, painting its own hand a bloody red.

  But that's all its swing had managed. A cut. As its arm flew past, the side of the creature's stomach slid into view.

  I slashed with my sword from the side. It shot up in the direction of the demon's arm, and my blade sliced through the meat as if cutting through melted butter. As the sound of its limb plopping down the snow reached my ears, blood gushed from the severed stump to paint my vision a blinding red.

  I didn't need my sight to know where I was going to stab next, though. I pulled my sword back, then thrust it to the front again. The tip of my blade squelched as it skewered the shapeling's stomach.

  By the time I managed to kick forward and push the demon out of my way, all the blinking I'd done had already returned my vision to me. I squinted my eyes, and saw the other shapeling tumble to the ground as its injured partner slammed against him. The surprise had the poor creature flinging out the ice javelin it'd been preparing right up into the sky.

  My shoulders finally slumped a little.

  They flailed for a second, then a second more, then I got close enough to the pairing that all it took was stabbing through the both of them for the demons to stop moving. Their breathing stilled right as their flailing did.

  The baby flew on ahead and stopped to hover over their corpses. With its chest puffed out and arms crossed in vicarious pride, a toothy grin fought to escape its mouth. "Go on, bub," it said. "You know what to do."

  ???

  The two cores gave off a bright blue color this bleeding sky was starting to have me miss. Their shape was round and smooth like that of a polished marble, which worked to reflect every bit of light that fell on it. Yet they were anything but hard to the touch. The orbs were malleable like jello, and flexible like a stress ball. I could squish them as hard as I could that they'd bounce right back with a jiggle nothing short of alien.

  I wiped some blood off my forehead before turning to the baby. "Am I going to have to gut the bastards every time I kill one of them?"

  "Maybe if you ask nicely enough, they'll do the gutting themselves. Why don't we try that next time?"

  I'm not even going to bother responding.

  Now that I was looking at these two cores more closely, I could understand why some people would have no qualms about eating them. While they didn't look particularly appetizing, a ball of what seemed to be jello was a long jump from the egg of pure agony the baby had wanted me to consume. When I asked it if these were also edible, the baby hit me with a candid, It's not that you can't, only that you're better off assimilating them.

  I turned my head back to the cores and blinked. "Why's that?"

  The baby hovered lower and lower until it was right above the corpses of the two maimed shapelings. With a pacifier in its mouth and a wooden stick in its hand, the baby thrust one of its arms at the demons and pointed. "Do you remember what happened earlier?"

  "With the pop-ups?" I asked.

  "Yes. That only happens when a demon's core has developed past a certain threshold."

  The baby suddenly spun in place. The magical twirl blurred most of its small figure, and a lab coat appeared over its body. It was only when it removed its pacifier to point it at me that I realized the small thing had transformed into an ornate metal pen. On its other hand, a small clipboard had also materialized. "That's what we call an essence-infused core. You become stronger by assimilating those."

  When I bore into the cores harder, I could tell there was indeed something to them I hadn't felt with the demon earlier. It was intangible, hiding underneath layer after layer of whatever properties energy had conferred on them, but something of value was definitely burrowing in there.

  "And I will only become stronger if I assimilate them?"

  The baby stilled in place and shrugged its small shoulders. "If you're that desperate for a bite, then don't let it be a baby to stop you. But you'll only notice a real difference if you assimilate them."

  "Alright, then. Know that if I grow a tail, I'll be coming for you."

  "Here's hoping you grow a spine instead."

  "..."

  I clutched a core with each of my hands. Once my eyes were closed, it didn't take long for me to fall into that same trance from earlier.

  Unlike before, where I found myself navigating the emptiness in search of the demon's core, the two shapelings had saved me the trouble of finding them and came straight for me.

  Both orbs had grown some one hundred times larger than they were on the outside. Their shell was still the same delicious-looking gelatinous blue you could almost squeeze out of existence, but their renewed bulk exuded a kind of demeanor even I was having trouble ignoring.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  At that moment, a fourth silhouette popped up. I turned to my right, my heart already jumping over the surprise, only to find the baby sticking a finger up its nose while its other arm stretched to point at one of the cores.

  I blinked. "How did you--"

  "You better focus, bub."

  My stomach.

  My ribcage.

  My spine.

  One of the orbs rammed me so hard I flew until I hit a ceiling I hadn't even known was there. Every bone in my body felt like it'd snapped the second that blow connected.

  I opened my eyes just in time to see one of the orbs come zooming for me again.

  I flinched. My hands went up.

  And the baby kicked the core with enough strength to send it bouncing towards yet another invisible wall. "Haha. And here you thought you were in for a good time."

  I clenched my chest, pleading with it as though that'd lead us to working something out, but was promptly reminded I had no physical body up in here. When I opened my mouth to speak, only a raspy and pained wheezing came out. "Why the fuck did it attack me?!"

  "They don't want to become your next meal is all. Just try and do your thing, bub. I'll keep them busy."

  I kept my eyes peeled on the two cores while every sliver of my being fought to find my bearings. As soon as the baby shouted a hurried, "Grab the one on the left!", ten tendrils of energy sprouted from my fingers to fly at the one orb the baby had let through.

  My energy flew true. The core came to a sudden halt, trying its best to roll out of the tendrils' path, but was traveling so fast it could only let me wrap the thing in full.

  The first tendril struck horizontally. The orb tried to squish its way into freedom, but a second tendril fell on it. A third and fourth tendrils followed. They filled out the orb's reflective casing diagonally, leaving only a few loose patches of its surface to cover.

  I tugged on the orb harder than I thought I could. All six of the remaining tendrils jumped to envelop the blue orb in the red of my energy.

  All that was left was to suck its energy in--

  But the core began spinning. The tendrils had tightened around the orb so hard that my body was sent hurtling along with every degree that thing turned.

  I had no time to waste. Still flailing about the air like a ragdoll, I immediately made to suck the core's energy into myself. The more of its energy I assimilated, the more invigorated I felt. After a few seconds, our positions had already swapped. The core, reduced to some more believable dimensions, lost the strength to toss me around, and I began doing the spinning instead.

  First, the ceiling. Then, the floor. Then, back to the floor again. I pivoted onto my right foot and sent it plummeting against another one of the invisible walls.

  By the time I had grown tired of flinging the poor thing around, it had more than lost its will to fight. I assimilated the very last bit of its energy and the orb vanished.

  When I turned to stare at the baby, it had already found its way right beside me. It flew in boring, meandering circles, filling the air with the lack of purpose of an octogenarian in their morning walk. Then, it pointed its chin at the core, its glistening skin riddled with craters the size of the baby's feet.

  "That wasn't so bad, was it?" Its rosy cheeks puffed out as it smiled at me. "Are you ready for round two?"

  ???

  Every muscle, every bone, and every ligament in my body was shaking like I'd just run laps around the Earth. Whatever it was about my chest that had been helping me do all that magical stuff was sure to explode with how shriveled my body had been left after assimilating the cores of the two shapelings.

  There was nothing refreshing about this sensation, either. A lifetime of waking up to that mundane post-workout soreness was a better fate than having to put up with this inhumane pain for even a single minute.

  I dropped both of my arms and let my head slump right down the snow. "By God that was fucking exhausting."

  "What do you mean, was? We're just getting started."

  Pain be damned; my head perked right up. "You're telling me it's not over yet?"

  The baby pointed a fat finger at one of my arms. "Look at your hands."

  I did as told--

  And saw two bumps growing from right underneath my knuckles.

  I froze. "Baby."

  "Yes?"

  "What the fuck is that?"

  "Oh, that?" The baby scratched the back of its diaper before paying me a smile no evil in this world could dream of replicating. "That's the tail you said you were going to grow."

  I shot to my feet. My hands shook as vigorously as they possibly could, and I smashed my two fists together in the hope that that would make the bumps go away.

  And, in a way, they did. But it didn't take long for that thing to fight back. The skin on my right hand settled, looking as smooth as it always had, but the bump on my left hand grew to thrice its initial size. When my palm fell on the hideous thing, I found that the bump had magically jumped back to my other hand, its size having increased for the second time now.

  The baby's chortling grew to a lispy howling. My mumbling, on the other hand, took to an unsightly yowling.

  I could only drop to my knees.

  The bump must have grown tired of all my shaking. Stretching the skin in my hands so badly I had to clench my teeth not to pass out in pain, the round protrusion began making its way up my arm and over my bicep. It shot to my shoulder, dragging through my body like sandpaper on skin, and ran circles around my neck before scrambling up my skull.

  I clawed at every inch of my head. I scratched, and scratched, and scratched, digging into the skin with all ten of my fingers, but the bump would move before I could get to it. It went around my ear, past my cheekbone, and landed on one of my eyeballs. It pushed it straight into my skull, and spun around in place like my eye socket was for sale and the bump was a potential buyer. After an excruciating second I could have mistaken for an eternity, the bump finally went sliding down my chest.

  I grabbed it. Both of my hands trembled violently as I mustered my strength to press down on my chest--

  But the bump was as good as gone.

  The moving had died down. The pain had died down. Everything had died down. Even my eye, which should have been a mushy mess of an injury by now, was working just as well as before.

  When I looked up, I noticed the sky had become even redder.

  Even brighter.

  And several new shining windows had come to life.

  Notice:

  You have formed an energy core.

  New system functionalities have been unlocked.

  Notice:

  A new essence has been assimilated.

  Shapeling's Low-Grade Essence (First Circle)

  Shapeling's Medium-Grade Essence (First Circle)

  Notice:

  You have leveled up.

  Transformation Level 1 > Level 2

  Transformation Level 2 > Level 3

  Transformation Level 3 > Level 4

  My eyes swiveled over to the cascading wall of text before landing back on the baby.

  "Well then, bub. What do you think of your new tail?"