soft? tough? easily destroyed? that should give you a hint to its identity…
aren’t all slime molds super-fragile?

The micrographs are very low magnification- 10×. The structures are…. Well see all of the spiky, white projections? It is those things magnified. I think I must have looked at the brown (gleba?) interior, and I think I recall it being uninformative, but I’ll see if I can find this thing again. I saw it in a bag around here somewhere.

What is the magnification and what are the names of the structures you are showing us?

the second to last image looks like if it is a mxyo Reticularia lycoperdon, which i have seen on conifer (though not slime mold preferred habitat) But in my experience, i have not seen P tomentosus this clustered on anything before, and i agree that at least for the shape, if it were, it would be a different Polycephalomyces.
I have seen B. maxima crust over like this but not on pine. The scope images dont look like myxo spores. Do you have one of that fungus?

Slime Mould??

I don’t know about P. tomentosus based on the photos I have seen… In the other photos, the structures are much more widely spaced and consistently ball-on-a-stick shaped, and here they are dense and irregular.