Chapter 27

"You can speak?" I tried to say, but that's when I realized I had never attempted to speak before, and had no means of doing so.

"I have lived in these waters since this world was nothing but a puddle! I have gone through three evolutions. Even those other fish that think themselves so powerful have only gone through one. You are nothing to me but an ant facing a god! You think to oust me from my home? Think again!"

I realized that he wasn't speaking with his mouth. I didn't have ears to hear him if he did. He seemed to have some other communication method. I couldn't figure out what it was though. I also realized that the only reason I could understand what he was saying was because of the skill Translation. By all accounts, cellular Translation had nothing to do with understanding language. It converts genetic information to the language or proteins. However, that conversion seemed to work between species too, and thus I was somehow able to understand them.

"Enough of this! Time to die!"

My danger sense immediately went off, and his body began to glow with a bright light. Suddenly, an eruption of water flowed toward me. I thought it was Water Jet, but it was far too large and it moved too quickly. The net I was preparing was obliterated as a wave flew through it. It was at that moment I realized he wasn't using physical skills. This fish was using magic!

-10,000 HP

My mana still sat embarrassingly at 0, yet this fish could cast magical spells! With what felt like a roar, it erupted out, its tail lashing and striking my cells. Every cell it struck was instantly destroyed.

-50,000 HP

-100,000 HP

-80,000 HP

So quick! He moved like lightning. Any time I tried to bring my cells together, he pounced on them. My camouflage didn't seem to work at all. He had some way of detecting me. At least, he could detect me when they collected within a certain amount.

It didn't matter though. If I wanted to become a multicellular organism, I'd have to defeat him. If I wanted to rule the sea, I had to kill the final boss. Although he was hitting me quite a lot, in my current evolution I had 99 million health. He likely had a lot of health too if he reached his fourth evolutionary form, but it was in the thousands.

I clumped together a group of bombs and just as he attacked it, I destroyed them with Apoptosis. The explosion created a shockwave that even caused the kingfish to be thrown back. At that point, I attacked with waves of Water Jet. However, his scales might as well have been made out of steel. The Water Jet bounced off of him.

-100,000 HP

-120,000 HP

He was getting stronger like an old out-of-practice warrior regaining his old powers. Although I still had tons of cell bodies as well as HP to spare, I wasn't as confident as when I started. I had to widdle him down. The advantage I had was stats, and so I had to take advantage of them. I began setting up traps, striking him once at a time. It felt a bit like the army trying to take down Godzilla. He even had an atomic breath. He shot out a horrifying laser from his mouth which ripped through a lot of units.

-1,000,000 HP

That one hurt. Still, I managed to electric him. This slowed him down for a bit. I then managed to create a spike with tissue which I hardened using Calcification. It acted just like a knife, stabbing into him. The backlash wasn't good though.

-10,000,000 HP

That one seriously damaged me, but it was more like I damaged myself in exchange for opening up a wound on his side. I immediately sent in colonies of immune cells. Fighting the fish at the macro level might take forever. My only choice was to try to win at the micro-level. It was his immune system against my own. My cells entered his body looking to do as much damage as possible. He wasn't able to stop this because the cells were too small for him. This was my advantage.

He continued to physically fight, but I backed off a bit and worked on Mitosis to recover my losses. At first, he continued to search for colonies of mine to kill, but I dispersed them across the pond. Meanwhile, I continued to fester within his wound, replicating cells out of control and then attacking his body. As this happened, I could only sit back and wait.

Once I had recovered most of my HP, I launched another surprise attack on him. I realized that when he was resting, his immune system seemed to become stronger. I had started to lose the battle. If I wanted him to grow sicker, I had to continually stress him out, and that meant I couldn't let him rest and recover. I began another assortment of bombings and electrutions.

I'd attack for a few hours, retreat, and then attack again. It was brutal warfare, but it was the only way I could take the kingfish down. He was far too powerful on his own. A direct fight between us could kill us both, and I wasn't the kind to trade my life. It was difficult to say how long the battle went. Day after day passed, but I no longer kept all that much track of them.

Days felt a bit like breathing for me. While there was light, I could photosynthesize, turning light into energy. This was the only way energy was added to the sea. All other energy already existed within the sea. At night, Photosynthesis shut down and I could go through gluconeogenesis, the production of sugar. If energy wasn't brought into the pond through photosynthesis, then there would be nothing living in the pond to fight or eat.

Breath in, breathe out… Photosynthesis for eight hours, sugar production for sixteen. Well, I didn't know if the days were twenty-four hours here. Such things needed a frame of reference. At least the day and night cycle as well as the seasons felt the same.

More and more scars build up on the kingfish, and his body begins to move slower and slower. The wounds on its sides were starting to fester thanks to my constant attacks. Of course, my ability to target its immune system only comes from my bacterial routes. Had I started as a multicellular organism, I would have not been able to fight either.

The kingfish thrashed about. It was furious that it was losing, but no matter what, it couldn't hunt down one hundred million of my cells. In fact, with every breath of its gills, I could sneak more and more cells inside it. These cells violently attacked every organ possible, attempting to render the kingfish immobile. Finally, after weeks and weeks of fighting, it fell back down to the bottom. I collected all of my body cells and spun another blade using Calcification. I intended this to be the final strike.

Floating down in front of the fish, its eyes opened once again. "So… this is how I'll go. Not with glorious battle, but slowly eaten away by illness."

"I'm sorry," I spoke back. "It's survival of the fittest. Either I can destroy you, or you can destroy me. These waters are too small for the both of us."

The fish's eyes widened for a moment. "So, you are evolved as well? No wonder… I lost. At least, I lost… to a powerful opponent."

"I'll make it quick," I told him.

Using the propulsion from a million water jets, the calcified missile slammed into the fish's head. I released electricity at the same moment. The fish jerked slightly as its skull was penetrated, but then it floated up and away from the deepest parts of its home. I had finally done it. I had become the master of this world. The last beast from the deep was gone, and everything living was so small beneath me that they didn't even warrant a challenge.

I had taken over every level of structure. My cells produced energy, stored the energy, and expelled the energy. My cells were everywhere from the surface and shores to the deepest recesses. With one hundred million cells at my disposal, I tried something I hadn't done in a while. I stretched out. I brought myself to their limit allowed. That limit continued to expand with each level, so every time I leveled, not only did I have twice as many body cells, but every cell could also stretch further as well. I began to map out the shoreline, but then I continued. I ignored the remaining fish still moving around as I mapped out my world.

The gaps between body cells are quite large now. It felt a bit weird to have fish swimming around inside me, but I still managed to expand my senses until I reached the edges. That's right, I filled my entire domain. I felt the limit to the space I occupied. As I did so, my senses even began to expand a little bit outside of my domain. I began to feel a hot, dry domain just outside of my reach.

I started to do the math in my head, trying to get my bearings straight. That's when a horrifying realization struck me. I wasn't in some untenable sea. I wasn't in a vast alien freshwater ocean. I wasn't the rising overlord of an untamed world. I wasn't even a fish. I had evolved for countless years, fighting until I ruled an entire ocean, and only now that I saw it in its entirety, I realized what it was.

"A pond. I'm the king of a pond."