I was a tree.

I estimated my chances of escape and decided that I couldn't possibly get away in time, unless I cut off all of my roots, which would probably injure me catastrophically.

Where would I even go? Nobody waited for me anywhere. Kopusha's family and friends were dead. Vladislav could not get back to Earth. Leemy was a tree.

I sighed.

I decided to give up on repairing the shield. The Phantom in the future-vision-dream seemed intelligent enough. Maybe it... she could be reasoned with? Maybe I could speak with her, convince her that collaboration is possible.

Maybe I could tame her even... as long as my [Tamus-Anima] was way above its level.

I pulled out the [Life Forge] spell. I had no need to create new things at this point. I dumped the 10 points I got from levelling up into Intelligence. I'd definitely need the extra intelligence if I was to convince this... phantom that I was a friend and not a foe to be subjugated.

I put Tamus-Anima into the empty skill slot, changing it from a Song-Spell into a skill. I started to Identify every single data strand of [Tamus-Anima], slowly memorizing every single bit, every notch of the two words.

Time passed. Maybe it was a few days, maybe a few months, maybe a few years, maybe even a decade.

I had no idea. The damn Astral Ocean was really messing with my sense of time. Through repeated brute-force memorization and computation of the word [Tamus-Anima] I had finally arrived at the visual fractal for it and kept on memorizing it more and more.

My endless mental labor paid off, the [Tamus-Anima] skill jumped to [LV 10] according to the Soul-Song's judgement. Hopefully it would be...

I heard the second screech. Deja Vu.

I looked up from my mental computation at the fight.

Everything had transpired just like in my dream, with the bigger, hollow Mother chasing away the smaller whale.

Mother began to circle the shield, stopping right at the fissure that it had shot the ray through priorly.

Before she fired upon me, I released the [Tamus-Anima] spell at her. The spell passed through the shield and slammed right into her face.

She jolted but didn't screech, didn't fire her mind-controlling ray.

She looked at me with hundreds of brilliant-silver blue eyes. There was intelligence, wisdom there... an understanding.

A little something... a smaller copy of the beast emerged from its hollow shell. It stopped right in front of the aberration-repelling safety bubble, flickered and turned into... a girl?!

"What?!" I yelped as the ghostly girl stepped right through the shield, walking towards me.

I aimed and shot [Tamus Anima] right at the ghostly girl.

She looked upon me with an incredibly sad expression.

"M-my name is Destiny...and I am a human Emissary of Mother," she uttered. "And you are...?"

"My name is Vladislav Kerenski," I said. "It is nice to meet you... Emissary Destiny."

The girl nodded and glanced back at the enormous hollow-shelled Phantom. "M-mother says H-hello."

I smiled inwardly. Progress! I was right! Mother could be reasoned with.

"Do you mind telling her not to fire her ray at me? I am very reasonable," I said. "Perhaps we can collaborate..."

"Y-yes... w-we can collaborate," the ghost stammered and stepped closer to my tree. "But first you must accept our Mother's gift, so that she may speak to you... personally."

Before I could say anything else, the ghost's hand unfolded into a hundred blades. Her blades cut right through my trunk.

[-15 in Soul]

I screamed. It hurt... it hurt way more than in the dream. Damnation!

I feared that she would hit me again, but the ghost stopped moving. Coldness was spreading across my trunk all the way down to my roots and up to my eye-stalks. I tried to get more power from the fracture beneath me, to feel warmer, better.

It worked only marginally as I shed a bunch of tree-bark, bathing myself in the current of the leaking battery.

"You are strong," I heard a voice made of voices.

I knew that it was Mother. She was speaking to me inside my own soul, having infected it somehow. I tried to block out the voice and found that I could not.

"You are clever," Mother said. "You have... potential."

"Get out of my head," I growled.

"Did you not want to parlay with me?" Mother asked. "Do you not wish to work together? I... promise, I won't hurt you again. You are... an irregularity. You are not like the others here. You are self-aware. You, like me, are an impossibility made manifest. I wish to know more. Where do you come from?"

"E-earth," I replied, unable to keep myself from speaking. "An Empire called USSR that was destroyed by our arrogance and foolishness."

"Interesting.... how interesting," she uttered, the voice made of voices purring and vibrating. "Do you know why your mind is intact? I taste two little souls inside you... but they are weak, broken... nothing like you."

"I don't know," I replied. "I have no idea."

"I'll figure it out," she said. "In time. I am good at figuring things out."

. . .

Mother did not leave my side. A thousand creatures tethered to her by the same chains I now wore protected my tree. Under her orders, I grew, levelled up, feasted on the Astral Engine beneath me.

She asked me questions about Earth. About me. About USSR. About science...

It took her a very long time to pry everything out of me - maybe months, maybe years, but she had slowly, cautiously leeched information out of me via her interrogation.

She had discovered that I knew how to make spells beyond my level.

She asked me to teach her. I refused. Destiny struck me again.

My refusal became... less strong.

Mother brought me shards of other phantoms, pre-digested by her, mostly drained and free of their personality. She fed them to me to grant me [Experience]. They looked like bits of people. I tried to refuse to eat.

Destiny hit me with her hand-claws.

I complied. I consumed people. I grew. I got the [Soul-Hunter] and [Aberration] tags.

Every time the ghostly girl hit me, I lost a bit of my personality, a bit of my memory, a bit of my soul.

I would not go down like an idiot. I would not lose to this monster.

I would not stay bound, but I was trapped, constantly surrounded by a thousand of her other children. They were phantoms of all shapes and sizes. Some had occasionally come from the deep Astral, bringing... us food that looked like people. Fresh... souls. Mother called them that.

As I slowly taught Mother Earth mathematics, I also used [Identify] to bring up a single skill of mine.

. . .

Neither of us aged.

There were no clocks in the Astral, but I was certain that it had been at least a few decades. Maybe more. Mother was getting awfully close to understanding fractal math... she was close to figuring out how I was computing spells. She was clever and she was learning.

I had taught her as much as I knew and she was getting too damn close to the truth.

"You must tell me, you must guide me how to unlock every door, with your mathematical key," she said. "This is my desire. I am so very close. I can almost compute a spell in my soul. Soon I will..."

That's when I struck.

The damned chains of the vile infection kept me from directly firing a spell at Mother, but... I had found a way... pulled against the soul-binding chain with all of my remaining will to do just one thing.

I aimed [Sectus LV 50] at the battery fissure right beneath me.

"No! Stop! What are you doing?! I command you to..." Mother yelled in an chorus of voices. It was too late. The spell struck the battery beneath my roots.

For just a moment nothing happened and then the world ignited as the battery beneath me caught fire, releasing all of its stored power all at once.

The Astral Ocean around us ignited, boiling away and Mother screamed. I screamed. Destiny screamed.

Our screams entwined in primal, mutual suffering and pain as our souls burned, withered away.

The black obelisk above us groaned, its base melting as wild mana all around us burned. The other batteries surrounding it began to spark, fissures forming all over them. The dead bodies all around us turned to dust.

Destiny died first. Her ghost simply boiled away into nothing.

"You idiot! What have you done?!" Mother screamed, trapped in the boiling Astral, unable to move away as her threads burned. "You've doomed us both!"

[-50 in Soul]

"Have fun in hell, mother," I uttered as the obelisk fell down upon the two of us, crushing us, trapping us beneath its black surface.

My branches burned away, my stalk-eyes popped one by one.

All of the Astral Engine batteries tethered by the snowflake structure to the obelisk around us ignited then and detonated with blinding, all-consuming magical inferno.

[THE END]