Being a jellyfish was, and Andy would stand by this assessment for the rest of his evolutionary career, the most fun he had ever had in a body that didn't have a skeleton.

  The nerve net changed everything. Not in the dramatic, narrative-climax way. In the quiet way a first pair of glasses changes a nearsighted kid's understanding of trees. He had been perceiving the world through chemistry for his entire second life, reading the pond the way a bloodhound reads a room. Functional. Kept him alive. Not, in any meaningful sense, experiencing.

  Now he was experiencing.

  The water had texture. Not smooth and uniform, but layered and varied, with pockets of warmth and threads of cold and currents that pushed against his bell the way a hand feels wind. When he swam through a cold pocket near the surface, the sensation was unpleasant and, paradoxically, wonderful.

  "I have a nervous system," he thought, pulsing through a frigid current, "and the second thing I feel is the cold." Warmth had been a revelation. Cold was more like a complaint. His nerve net registered it with the insistent displeasure of a smoke detector at three in the morning: technically useful, delivered at maximum annoyance. "I would like a refund on this specific sensation. Is there a customer service desk? System? No? Fine."

  The stinging cells were interesting from an intellectual perspective and horrifying from a personal one. Each tentacle was studded with cnidocytes, coiled barbed threads loaded with paralytic toxin that fired the instant something brushed against them. Faster than his nerve net could track. He was armed with reflexes he hadn't consented to, hair triggers built into his skin, a minefield distributed across four trailing appendages.

  The first time his cnidocytes fired, he stung a rock.

  Not his proudest moment. A fragment of mineral deposit drifted into his trailing tentacle, and his cnidocytes unleashed a volley of paralytic barbs into a thing that was already as paralyzed as matter could be. The toxin dissipated uselessly. The rock drifted on, unimpressed. Andy's nerve net buzzed with the chemical equivalent of "false alarm, sorry, my bad."

  "Great," he thought. "I'm a twelve-millimeter weapons platform with no trigger discipline. Somewhere, my hypothetical drill sergeant is weeping."

  But the horn. His horn, the one that had followed him from single-celled simplicity through two evolutions, now a hardened lance point at the tip of his longest, thickest tentacle. That was a different story entirely. The horn required intent. It didn't fire automatically like the cnidocytes; it struck when Andy committed, when he aimed and drove the point forward with deliberate muscular force. It was a weapon he controlled, and controlling it felt right in a way the stinging cells didn't match.

  He practiced. Not because the pond graded on form, but because Andy Snodgrass was constitutionally incapable of having a tool and not optimizing his use of it. He found a mineral outcrop and used it as a target dummy, driving his horn-tentacle into the rock face from different angles, cataloguing which approaches generated the most force, which trajectories allowed the fastest retraction, learning the sweet spot where tentacle extension and bell propulsion combined into the devastating one-two of "arrive fast, hit hard" that he was tentatively calling "The Express Delivery."

  He was adding to the list of named moves. The list was getting long. The list was, he recognized, a coping mechanism that doubled as a tactical manual, and he refused to be embarrassed about either function.

  The Express Delivery: full-speed approach, horn leading, bell propulsion providing the thrust. Maximum penetration, minimum subtlety. He was aware of how that sounded. He was keeping the name.

  The Curtain Call: tentacles forward, cnidocytes primed, and when the target was paralyzed by the sting, follow up with the horn from behind the curtain of tentacles. Sting then stick. Required timing.

  The Spiral: a corkscrew maneuver that spun his horn-tentacle in a tight arc. Andy had discovered the rotational capability by accident (tried to turn left, overcommitted) and weaponized it within minutes because that was what gamers did with physics engine quirks.

  [XP: 18/250]

  Eighteen XP from target practice and the handful of smaller organisms that had wandered into spike range while he worked. Not bad for what was essentially a training montage.

  The hunting was different at this tier. Not harder, exactly, but differently challenging, the way chess is different from a fistfight. Cell combat had been direct: find thing, stab thing, eat thing. Jellyfish combat was spatial. He had geometry now. A bell to orient, tentacles to position, a horn to aim, and the targets were colonial organisms with their own body plans and their own ideas about who was eating whom.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  The first real fight happened near a thermal vent.

  Andy had been picking off smaller colonial organisms (Tier 1 holdovers that hadn't evolved, sad little clusters that popped open when his horn touched them) when he sensed something new. A chemical signature that was complex and large and moving with the same directed purpose he moved with. Another hunter.

  The other organism was a siphonophore-analog, a chain of specialized units linked together like cars in a microscopic train. Twice his length, maybe three times, moving through the water with an undulating grace that Andy found both beautiful and personally offensive. It was in his hunting ground, and beauty did not excuse trespassing.

  The siphonophore sensed him and changed direction, angling toward him. His cnidocytes primed automatically, the hair triggers loading with the reflexive readiness of a cat arching its back.

  "Okay," Andy thought, with a calm clarity that had been entirely absent from his human life (where the closest he'd come to physical danger was a golden retriever that didn't like thermometers), "this is a real fight. With something that can fight back."

  The siphonophore struck first. One of its feeding units extended toward his bell, trailing stinging filaments that would, if they made contact, paralyze his nerve net, which was his favorite thing about his new body and he was not prepared to lose it to a chain of colonial cells with delusions of grandeur.

  Andy dodged. A hard pulse sent him angling out of the filaments' path, and they passed through the space he had occupied a fraction of a second earlier. The siphonophore reconfigured, bringing a second unit to bear, then a third, coordinating multiple attack vectors simultaneously. A distributed combat system that was, frankly, elegant.

  It was also bigger than him, more complex than him, and had more weapons than him.

  Andy had one horn.

  "But it's a really good horn," he told himself, and committed to The Express Delivery.

  He pulsed hard, driving forward at maximum velocity, horn-tentacle extended like the lance of a jousting knight, aimed at the junction between the siphonophore's locomotion unit and its first feeding unit. The structural weak point. The seam where the whole operation was held together by colonial goodwill and not much else.

  The horn struck home. Crunch.

  Not the thin pop of a single cell. A proper crunch, the sound of something with structure giving way, and the impact traveled up his tentacle and through his nerve net, part physical jolt and part something deeper:

  [CRITICAL HIT!]

  [HORN STRIKE: DAMAGE BONUS +25%]

  Horn strike. Not spike strike. Horn strike. The System had classified his calcium spike as a horn, the same one it had been tracking since Tier 1, two tiers into a six-tier rare trait chain, and when that horn struck a critical point on a living organism, the System gave it a damage bonus. This wasn't just a weapon. It was his weapon. His signature. His thing. The thing that kept getting bigger and harder every time he leveled up, and at this point the innuendo was so obvious that even the System seemed to be in on the joke.

  The siphonophore recoiled, the chain of units rippling as the damaged junction leaked cellular material into the water. Not a killing blow, but enough to disrupt coordination, and in the moment of disarray Andy circled and struck again from below, driving the horn into a feeding unit. Crunch.

  [HORN STRIKE: DAMAGE BONUS +25%]

  Two hits. The siphonophore was losing cohesion, units drifting apart, its greatest strength (cooperation) becoming its greatest weakness (a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and Andy was very good at finding links to break).

  He struck a third time. Crunch. A fourth. Crunch. Express Delivery, Curtain Call, Spiral, each one punctuated by the System's horn bonus, and the siphonophore, which had entered this fight as the larger, more complex, objectively more formidable organism, came apart in slow, drifting pieces that Andy gathered and absorbed with the efficiency of a heterotroph that had chosen violence at every available opportunity.

  [ORGANISM DEFEATED: SIPHONOPHORE-ANALOG (COLONIAL, TIER 2)]

  [XP GAINED: +12]

  [BONUS: FIRST TIER-EQUIVALENT KILL. ADDITIONAL +5 XP]

  Seventeen XP from a single fight. More than any kill he had managed as a cell. The tier-equivalent bonus was the System's way of saying "good job killing something your own size." The participation trophy's aggressive older cousin.

  Andy floated in the debris field, absorbing nutrients and processing the fight the way he used to watch his own gameplay replays. Twenty-five percent extra damage on every horn hit. The System was actively encouraging him to build his entire combat identity around the horn.

  The horn that was Tier 2 of 6 in a rare trait chain the System refused to explain. Growing bigger with every evolution. Getting stronger every time he used it. Rewarded every time he stuck it in something.

  "You're leading me somewhere," Andy thought, addressing the System directly. "This horn goes somewhere. Tier 6. I'll figure it out."

  The System, characteristically, said nothing. Tease.

  [XP: 35/250]

  Andy shook off the analysis (a difficult gesture without shoulders, but he managed a bell-pulse that communicated the sentiment) and oriented his horn toward the next chemical signature in the water.

  There were more siphonophores out there. More colonial organisms competing for the same thermal vents and nutrient clouds and territorial claims that Andy had staked by virtue of being the thing in this pond with the biggest horn and the willingness to use it.

  He was twelve millimeters of radial symmetry and predatory intent, armed with a lance and a growing catalogue of named attacks and the stubborn conviction that the pointy option was taking him somewhere worth going.

  Time to joust. He was feeling horny.