Who knew suction-cup feet could sound so ominous?
With a spike held high overhead, Lucy prepared to strike down the creature that had been chasing her, already chastising herself for getting into the situation in the first place.
I should really check the shop for some more sensory organs. If I had known this guy was over there chowing down I could’ve gotten ready or prepared a plan or fucked off in the other direct—
Oof!
A clamping beak closed around Lucy’s arm, and the spike she’d held in it a moment before began to drift away.
Biting pain erupted along her outer membrane as her body worked to patch the hole and re-form the appendage, drawing heavily upon her energy and nutrient reserves.
That was fine. Lucy knew by now that her body could regenerate itself decently quickly, as long as she had the energy to do it.
Then she saw that the weapon had begun to dissolve as it slowly floated away, detached from her body.
Okay, didn’t know that would happen.
Her cilia had not proved their worth. Stupid hairs! Couldn’t even get away from a damn suction-cup footed beaked…wolf…thing!
In her cilia’s defense, Lucy had outrun the organism that had just chomped off her hand. Her cilia had taken her swiftly and surely down the tunnel right until the point where it narrowed into a dead-end.
Where she’d promptly been cornered.
Apparently, she resembled the dead-meat the scavenger organism normally ate closely enough that she made a tasty looking treat. Cornered in the dead-end, Lucy had been forced to turn and fight.
It had been going well, until the creature bit off her hand.
Acting as quickly as her body would allow and her concentration could facilitate, Lucy worked to reform the appendage and grab the spike before it was gone completely. She wasn’t sure she’d have the energy to make another, and the beaked-wolf-thing currently trying to tear her to shreds definitely wasn’t going to give her much time to do it.
Sending a rush of protein-filled molecules from her cytoplasm out to her membrane, Lucy repaired her outer membrane and began stretching it outwards again.
Unfortunately, as she reformed the appendage, the creature just kept on gnawing, and for a split second Lucy felt the disturbing sensation of basically extending her growing hand into the thing’s mouth as it chewed.
It was disgusting, and extremely painful.
But it’s not doing too much damage.
Despite its ferocity, the creature was making slow progress through Lucy’s membrane, the gooey material of it gumming up the beak and forcing the creature to take its time.
Thank-you, upgraded membrane strength!
Even through the haze of pain and distress that had caused her to yank the appendage back, Lucy saw a path forward, a path to victory in what was turning out to be a very strange battle indeed.
Although she’d just drawn it out of reach, Lucy extended her bitten appendage forward again, mentally gritting her teeth as the single-minded creature began to feed hungrily again, its beak clacking madly as it worked its way up her arm, rippling the water as it worked its beak furiously to get through.
At the same time, she formed a second appendage, and reached out for the dissolving spike.
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It was all she could do to maintain the abilities through the pain, taxing her focus nearly as much as her willpower. But ultimately all she had to do was keep growing both of the her appendages, and ignore everything else.
Like the excruciating pain.
Well, I never said the plan was perfect!
It was unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. Even in her first fight when she’d been stabbed, it had been sudden and fast, not drawn out like this. Lucy felt tears of cytoplasm begin to well up along her membrane as she struggled to maintain her skill.
As the creature continued to feed on her ever-growing arm, Lucy reached out the other and grasped the spike.
It was noticeably thinned, but even as she brought it down towards the beaked-wolf’s head, she saw layers of proteins flowing up her arm and solidifying around the weapon, bringing it back to a sharp point and thickening around the base.
Lucy pondered the mechanism for that as she killed the creature eating her hand.
Some sort of os…mosis…maybe!
The organism’s membrane yielded to her weapon far easier than she’d expected, and with two powerful blows, it was over. The creature slumped dead to the ground, and Lucy floated there in shock. She had gone from struggling for her life to standing over a corpse so quickly that her mind could hardly make sense of what had just happened.
After a moment of staring at the body, she realized she was still sending energy and molecules to her appendage to keep it growing. The arm the wolf had been chewing now stretched out of her membrane like a pool noodle, far enough away from her body that it started drifting in the slow current.
Lucy pondered that. She’d thought of her ability to form appendages as more of a stretching of her outer membrane than the construction of something totally new, but it seemed in reality like it was a little bit of both, with her outer membrane stretching itself but also combining with new material to form the new growth.
After retracting the gooey appendage back into her body with an effort of will, Lucy brought her attention back to the wolf looking organism that had tried, arguably successfully, to eat her.
It’s not really a wolf, though, is it?
As blue dots appeared from the corpse and flowed into her core, and her vision swam with fading pangs of pain, Lucy stared at the creature, dismissing the notification that popped up to tell her she’d been awarded 4 Evolution Points.
In death, the creature looked…kind of pathetic actually. Lucy questioned what had made her think of a wolf as she stared at the already-collapsing membrane.
Without the sniffing and chomping and awkward gait, the creature reminded her of nothing so much as—
Lucy winced as mental images came to her of torn and scattered fur, of mangled flesh heaped along the roadside.
Never thought I’d be eating roadkill, she thought queasily, not moving from where she floated above the corpse.
But eventually, her need for energy won out, and Lucy positioned herself closer to the body and opened her membrane channels, taking in the vital nutrients that leaked in a steady, slimy stream from the dual wounds near the creature’s mouth.
She’d thought of it as a head before, and had braced for the impact with bone she would have expected from stabbing a skull, but her dagger had slipped right through. If it hadn’t been for the pain of the thing eating her arm she might have killed the creature with less effort than it took to swim the length of the tunnel.
The thought was not a comforting one, and as she finished feeding, Lucy’s feeling of nausea grew rather than lessened. She didn’t even have a proto-head, after all, nor snout nor mouth nor beak. She was just a relatively sturdy blob with some hairs on it!
If something came along with just a little bit more intelligence, or a bit more strength, or more than one at a time, she was going to be in serious trouble.
Despite the unpleasant roiling in her cytoplasm, Lucy’s mind was clear as she decided something. The details of the plan would have to be worked out when she had more information, but for now, one thing was obvious to the little single cell.
She needed to get stronger.
***
Lucy laughed internally as she remembered her days of running in high-school. This was…different. But the feeling of it was the same; the drive to move ever farther forward, ever faster.
What had started off as a search for prey had quickly turned into a trying-out of her new cilia, which she hadn’t gotten a chance to properly get familiar with before the scavenger had attacked.
As she practiced, Lucy internalized the timing of the superheated blasts of water that came up from nearby. Unlike before when she’d only known the blast was coming when the shaking had already started, she was now able to feel the low tremors in the water that built steadily into each eruption, giving her an accurate sense of when the next blast would come even without timing them.
Lucy reveled in the ability to move as she pleased. She even went so far as to dash out to the edge of the shaft she’d come down and back after a blast. Satisfied that she could make it in time, she began to make her plan.
So far, the tunnels she’d been exploring had yielded nothing. Even the lone bacteriophages she’d spotted before seemed to be off in hiding, and that fight with the scavenger had taken a lot out of Lucy.
Which made sense, she supposed, since she had semi-willingly fed part of her body to it, but still. It meant she needed food.
Lucy could feel the hunger of her body, but as she dashed around the tunnels enjoying her new method of movement, she was still surprised when a notification popped up from her System.
[WARNING: LOW ENERGY]