The moment I saw a blur coming towards me, I used [Mathematical Cortex], my skill that allowed me to perform various mathematical calculations, and at the same time, had two sub-skills that allowed me to divide my mind into more than one focus and to increase my perception of the world around me.

  My movements slowed to a crawl as my mind accelerated. Still, I could only see a fish-shaped blur hitting me square in the chest. My barriers, created by [Multi-Layered Barrier], which were still cracked as they didn’t have enough time to fix themselves, were pierced, and I felt something stabbing me.

  The pain was immediate, as I felt it pushing deep inside me. Because of that, I recognized the shape of the fish to be similar to an Earth’s Marlin.

  I tried to grab it, but it swam backwards faster than I could move, pushing its long nose out of the wound it did to me. Unfortunately for it, my insides were filled with temporal energy, and the sword-like nose it had turned to dust moments after it left my body.

  I heard a high-pitched noise that hurt my ears. It looked like it roared, or did something similar to it. The next moment, I felt a capsule of high-pressure water envelop it and it shot away from me at an incredible speed.

  I could barely track it with [Magicule Detection], a skill that allowed me to perceive any magical energy around me, let alone my eyes. It simply moved too fast.

  I could increase my own speed by slowing down time with [Temporal Manipulation], but I had another, more urgent, problem.

  The impact that fish on my chest made me exhale the remaining air I had in my lungs. I instinctively tried to breathe in, but that only caused water to rush into my lungs, which made me cough it out, releasing yet more air.

  At that very moment, panic started to settle. My accelerated mind allowed me to feel my body reacting to the lack of oxygen. It’s not something you could just brush off because everything is in slow motion. It’s a primal instinct that overrides anything you might try to calm yourself.

  I began kicking my legs and flapping my wings, trying to move upwards and, hopefully, breach the surface to breathe.

  At that moment, I was hit again by the marlin. It hit me on my shoulder, sending me spinning out of control. My lungs were burning, and my HP was dropping incredibly fast on my status screen.

  A train of thoughts kept trying to swim upwards, another pulled [Magical Programming Language] and tried to create a spell that would create an air bubble, but it failed.

  The panic was even overriding the ability to push an emotion to a single train of thought.

  I was hit again, and once more I was sent tumbling backwards, erasing any progress I might have made.

  My vision started to darken around the edges. At the same time, I was filled with adrenaline. I knew that if I passed out, I would die. Be it by the lack of air, or simply by the marlin killing me.

  Another hit on my shoulder, but this time it was just a glancing hit. Yet, somehow, it cut through my scales. A deep gash appeared on my shoulder, turning the water green as my blood mixed with it.

  My vision blurred as I felt my consciousness starting to fade from the lack of air. I needed to do something, anything.

  I looked around rapidly, looking at my skill list, when my eyes stopped at the DNA list from [Genetic Dysphoria].

  During the panic, I had completely forgotten about one of the last additions to it.

  Before I passed out, I triggered the skill and felt my body compressing. Bones cracked, muscles tore, and reformed. Thankfully, the transformations that the skill allowed me didn’t hurt, or I don’t think I would be able to bear them.

  During the transition, the marlin came twice more, but the temporal charged water damaged it enough that it changed directions and avoided me.

  The moment gills formed on my body was like a breath of fresh air. My consciousness sharpened, and relief washed over me. I tried to take a deep breath, but couldn’t. My muscles weren’t working correctly yet, as the transformation was still underway, and the anatomy of gills made it impossible for me to do so.

  Suddenly, a splitting headache hit me like a truck. I felt like my head was going to split open from the pain. My vision started to become weird, blurry, and expanding. I felt [Mathematical Cortex] activating and gobbling a large amount of magicules for some reason I couldn’t quite understand.

  I tried to grab my own head, but my hands had already turned to fins. I could only contort in place as the pain felt like someone hitting my head with an axe.

  Just as it appeared, the pain vanished like it had never been there. In its place was another presence in my mind. It was at the same time familiar and strange.

  [Mathematical Cortex] was working overtime, and I could feel it was doing something it wasn’t exactly prepared to do. That second presence inside my mind was being sustained by it, and I couldn’t quite disable it.

  ‘Hello?’ I heard myself asking in my mind, no, not myself.

  ‘What?’ I asked, still unsure.

  If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  Through my eyes, I could see the green water slowly dissipating, and right by my side was another head, looking straight back at me.

  ‘Oh. Two-headed, I should’ve figured it,’ My voice overlapped with my own voice.

  I had understood what my skill was doing. When I make multiple trains of thought, it is still a single mind, just divided into several foci. But this was something else entirely.

  I have no idea what would’ve happened had I not had the skill, but right now, [Mathematical Cortex] was sustaining an entire second mind on the other head I had.

  ‘Before that fish returns,’ we both said at the same time. ‘Who’s the original and who’s the copy?’

  ‘I’m the original,’ we both said, at the same time, again.

  ‘No, I’m the original. I can feel [Mathematical Cortex] supporting you,’ we said.

  What? What did he mean he can feel the skill supporting me? The skill was clearly supporting him in… Oh no.

  We were at a stalemate. Apparently, we both were copies, somehow? I wasn’t sure on the specifics. What mattered was that we were both the original and the copy at the same time.

  We needed to resolv-

  Something punched through the end of my body, piercing it. We both screamed and tried to look at what happened, but our anatomy didn’t allow us to move our heads in that direction.

  With a side glance at one another, we both agreed that we needed to start moving. We were sitting ducks at the moment, and that marlin was using it to do damage.

  We tried to move our tail to push ourselves forward, but the problem arose when we both tried to control it, and nothing really happened except a weird wiggle as our tail tried to move in both directions at the same time.

  This wasn’t going to work. One of us needed to control the body fully while the other did something else, but deciding who was going to do it when both of us had the same thoughts would be hard. We needed to desync our thoughts somehow.

  At that moment, I saw the marlin, or the blurred shape of it, as it was still too fast for me to track, rushing through the right side, in a position where my other self wouldn’t have been able to see it.

  That was enough for me. I spun around and started to swim. My body responded easily, as there wasn’t another person trying to wrestle control of it.

  ‘What? How? Weren’t our thoughts synced?’ I heard my other self asking.

  ‘They were, but I saw the marlin,’ was what I gave as explanation. Which was enough, as I could feel him understanding.

  It was decided. I would control the body, and he would do other things. What other things? I don’t know, it would be his job to figure it out.

  The marlin was flying through the water like a jet flies through the air. It was too fast for me to catch up, but at least now I could breathe, unlike when I first appeared on this floor.

  The marlin changed directions and moved in our direction, stopping, opening his mouth, and I saw something like a water bullet shooting out of his mouth and coming straight at us.

  I dived as fast as I could, but it still hit the base of our tails. It easily broke through the regenerated barrier and cut through our tail like a hot knife through butter. It was the same attack he used before, and we were lucky it didn’t hit anything vital.

  I looked over the racial skill this transformation gave me. I didn’t have a clue what it was, it sounded like an attack, at least.

  I aimed at the marlin, who was moving to another position at high speeds, and activated the skill.

  I felt water wrap around us in an ellipsoidal shape, denser than the water around us, and in the next moment, we shot forward at a speed comparable to the marlin. It wasn’t an attack skill, but a movement skill, the same kind the marlin is using, it seems.

  Water was being compressed in front of us, moving through the ellipsoid and decompressing behind us, propelling us forward like a jet engine.

  I began chasing the marlin, who noticed us following it and made a U-turn, coming straight toward us. Our speeds made it close the distance like a missile.

  Its fins turned white, and it moved to crash into us with its fins. I was able to change to change directions just in the nick of time, and it's fin just glazed on top of us, but that simple touch was enough for it to cut through both barrier and skin, making a shallow gash on us.

  ‘It tried to bisect us!’ I heard my other self saying.

  ‘I know. You need to do something about it!’ I said back. I was in charge of driving, he was in charge of everything else.

  The marlin did another U-turn and started chasing us. I tried to change directions, but it kept following. It wasn’t like I could shake him off, there wasn’t a single obstacle around us as far as I could see. It was an open sea.

  All I could do was dump more and more magicules into the skill, which seemed to accelerate us a bit, but even that had its limits. The skill wasn’t as stable as my own. I could feel how stressed it was from the quantity of magicules being used by it.

  ‘It’s gaining on us. You need to do something!’ I shouted at my other self. I could feel the marlin approaching through [Magicule Detection]. He would be on top of us in a few moments if nothing were done.

  I could feel magical circles appear and vanish as whatever he was trying to do wasn’t working.

  I had an idea, but I didn’t know if it would work or how it would happen with us inside [Water Jet], the racial skill from the two-headed shark. But I was running out of ideas with my other self failing to do anything.

  [Mathematical Cortex] was already overworked, but I tapped into it and started making some calculations, which took longer to do because the skill was already at its limits. The moment I had what I needed, I used [Spatial Manipulation] and teleported us through the fourth dimension directly behind the marlin.

  Three things happened at that moment. The first was the [Water Jet] skill kept going without us for a few moments more, but without an anchor, it destabilized and detonated, releasing all the compressed water in an instant.

  The second thing that happened was me biting the marlin’s tail fin the moment I was in range of it, sinking my teeth into it.

  Then the third thing happened. I was halfway behind the water stream the marlin was generating to push him forward at fast speeds. The water current pushed me with such a force that I was dragged out, but not without tearing the marlin’s tail fin with me.

  It let out another high-pitched scream and turned toward us with its skill, and at the same time, it let the skill itself fade. The compressed water was released in a more controlled manner than what happened to our own [Water Jet].

  ‘I know what to do!’ I heard my other self saying as I stared at the marlin in the distance.

  ‘I really hope you do,’ I sent back.