I breathed a sigh of relief as Jun sat bolt upright, gasping for breath and staring down at her hands. I didn’t need to see the confirmation message that sat in the bottom of my vision to know that she’d accepted my offer.

My core had a second function that I hadn’t been aware of, and it sort of scared me. The second the light had left the eel’s blind eyes I’d been informed that //CREATION had activated, but what it had created was something unheard of.

A copy of the eel’s core, completely separate from the one hidden somewhere in its body. The true spoils of war for killing something as powerful as the eel, and I’d doubled it. If Jun or I had a lightning or flame-based core we would get so much more from consuming the eel’s core, but even without matching the type, it would still give us some serious bonuses.

Armor crushed me just a little as Jun pulled me into a hug. “I don’t feel amazing, but I feel so much better. I don’t know what you just did but thank you. Thank you so much.”

I smiled and patted her armored back, wincing as my hand stuck to her back. My skin wasn’t supposed to do that. “Consuming a core does that to you, yeah. And you’re welcome.”

Jun froze, then pushed me away so she was holding both of my shoulders with her visor locked onto my eyes. “Please tell me I didn’t just eat my own core.”

“Hell no.” I laughed, then gestured at the eel’s corpse. “You just ate a copy of that thing’s core that my core created. Can you help me butcher it to find the real one?” I asked, forcing my smile to stay as the pain finally settled in. Adrenaline and the potion had significantly dulled it, and burns weren’t the most pleasant injury.

She nodded and summoned her sword, then began cutting into the eel’s flesh as blood lazily dripped out of the wounds. “So you can eat cores to get stronger? I didn’t know that.”

I paused, trying to remember if I’d told Jun about consuming cores before, but I didn’t think I had. It was one of the more… unpleasant realities of the new world. “You can, yes. Some things naturally have cores, like the eel did, but most of them don’t. The needlemaws and lichenthropes didn’t, for example. And when you consume a core, you get some of the nodes it had.”

Jun nodded and carved away a huge chunk of flesh, tucking it away into her inventory before it hit the ground. “I have… five more nodes, but each of them were already filled. One of each type. That’s a huge boost, Seb.”

I had to agree with Jun’s assessment. Gaining one core mastery usually gave one single node, and it could take weeks to get that one upgrade. And depending on how strict a core’s node gain function was, someone could go months without ever using it. It was almost as if consuming cores was meant to be tempting.

“And it restores a good chunk of battery and armor integrity.” I added, calling my gauntlets to cover my burnt hands. I’d barely recovered any integrity or battery of my own, but not having my hands exposed to the air was a huge relief. “If you find anything strange inside the eel, call me over. It might be valuable.”

“Will do.” Jun confirmed, waving one bloody hand as I stepped over the eel’s head to carve away at its other side. “What about the meat and bones? Are they worth keeping?”

I shrugged. “Probably? If we find someone that has a cooking or alchemy-based core or function, they might be able to make good use of it.”

“Will do again.” Jun laughed, bending down as the sounds of butchery resumed.

The eel’s overwhelming heat dissuaded me from leaning in and getting a better angle. Moments ago I hadn’t cared in the slightest, pushing through discomfort and gritting my teeth against pain, but when life wasn’t on the line my pain tolerance went way down. I forced my arms to armor up and pulled my singed shirt over my mouth for a few pointless seconds, then called my helmet to protect myself. All I needed them to do was cover my body, which was all they could do with the pittance of battery I had left.

I pressed one hand down against extremely dry eel-skin that crackled and peeled at my touch, almost as if the creature was cooking itself in death. Which might have been closer to the truth than I’d thought, but it made cutting through the thing’s meat slightly more difficult. My sword caught in knots of overcooked flesh along with stopping abruptly whenever I hit bone, and in ten minutes I’d only managed to carve out a section of meat about as large as my chest. ‘Slow going’ didn’t even begin to describe my struggles, especially since my potion had worn off around halfway through.

“I think I found it!” Jun called excitedly from much further down the eel’s body. “Is it safe to touch it, or will that screw it up for you?”

My armor and weapon stowed away in my inventory with a single thought. “Touching it’s fine.” I assured her. As long as she didn’t start consuming the core, nothing short of destroying it would ‘screw it up’. But the difference in how much we’d each managed to butcher reminded me just how much stats mattered in this new world. It wasn’t as simple as whoever had the higher number would win a fight, but as Jun had just shown, a large gap meant almost exactly that.

The fight this time had been a non-competition, but if Jun’s people had been here for years, then I had to be ready to bridge those impossible gaps. Humans had given me enough shit when I was the same strength as they were, and I didn’t want to imagine the raging assholes Jun’s people could have produced with so many years on us.

I almost ran into Jun when she rounded the eel’s head, a sphere of jagged black metal between her hands. She held it up at eye level so I could see a small flickering flame inside with tiny thunderclouds above it.

“If this isn’t its core, I don’t know what is.” Jun said proudly, shoving the jagged core into my hands. It was infinitely too hot for me to be holding, but my reflexes from doing this dozens of times took over before the pain did.

My interface appeared while my skin fused to the eel’s core. I opened my core sub-section and scrolled down to a blank space under all the functions, then pressed the eel’s core forwards. The interface shattered into thousands of shards for a moment, freezing in the air like jagged stars, then came together in a violent vortex that hungrily tugged at the eel’s core.

It wasn’t anything like I was used to. All the other cores I’d consumed had simply popped out of existence and then I’d found myself with a few more nodes and a boost of integrity and battery. But if that was like throwing the core down a garbage chute, this was like offering it directly into the waste disposal.

And I physically couldn’t let go.

“This might be a huge mistake.” I chuckled nervously, the pain from the core slowly gaining on my reflexes. Jun just tilted her head to the side questioningly, unable to take her visor off my heavily injured fingers. I sighed and grit my teeth, forcing my eyes to stay open as I lowered my hands into the shattered vortex. “Here goes nothing.”

//CREATION ACTIVATED. COPY ALREADY DESIGNATED TO: JUNIPER KERATILY.

//INITIAL NODES GRANTED: 10.

//CORE MASTERY INCREASED BY 1.

The eel’s core was swiftly churned into luminescent slag, spread out through the whirlpool of shards, and disappeared. It was fairly anticlimactic for what I’d thought would be an intense moment, and when I pulled my hands out they hadn’t healed at all. I had to dismiss the destructive vortex and double-check my interface to see if anything had changed at all, and though it certainly had, it didn’t feel like it.

I had indeed been granted ten more nodes, exactly double what Jun had gotten. But I hadn’t been as lucky as she had with their contents; I had gained two battery nodes and one resilience node. Not the full suite, but nowhere near the worst that could happen. That had been when I’d consumed a massive turtle’s core with well over a hundred nodes and only gotten eight nodes in return, none of which had been filled. Dee had laughed himself to sleep that night, but I’d woken up in the morning to a full breakfast from the crotchety old bastard that he insisted wasn’t because he felt bad that I’d gotten screwed over.

I sighed and leaned back, calling my armor that now had enough battery and integrity to not be a burden. I felt like I should be more nostalgic for those times, but it also felt like I was remembering a vision of the future, not something I’d lived through. That was probably the only reason I was sane enough at the moment, but it still stung to think about.

“How many nodes did you get?” Jun asked excitedly, as if we were comparing which prizes we’d won.

“Ten for me.” I answered, scrolling over to my core display to set up the spine of enmity and the floodforest’s gift. “I know it seems like a lot more than you got, but–”

I paused at what I saw, and had to recount three times before I was sure I wasn’t seeing things wrong. I’d had eight nodes before this influx, plus ten from the core, and one from the mastery increase. And unless math didn’t work the same anymore, that equaled nineteen. No more, no less. It certainly didn’t equal twenty-six, the number that displayed next to the words ‘total nodes available’. I’d double checked just a minute ago, so how did I suddenly get ten more?

“But?” Jun prodded.

“But…” I trailed off once more, then shook my head. “It’s sort of random how many nodes you get when you consume a core, but there’s a degree of control to it. You can see the probabilities if you identify the core before you consume it, but it goes like this; if your core mastery is lower than that of the core you consumed, you get more nodes. If it’s higher, you get fewer.”

Jun nodded and crossed her arms. “That explains why we both got what we did. Oh, do you think that means I actually got four nodes from the core and my core brought it up to five? We never got to check if it works on everything or just stuff I’ve got equipped.”

If that was true, then Jun would probably be better off farming low-mastery core-bearing enemies instead of going for the bigger ones. Getting a haul of fifty after a hard day’s work was almost incomparable to getting only twenty.

But I didn’t think Jun would like that suggestion very much, so I shrugged. “Could be.”

She seemed strangely satisfied with my non-answer, and I was confused until she brought her hand up and began swiping through the air. If she was fiddling with her interface, I was going to test something out that I hadn’t expected to have a chance at so soon.