Almost immediately, she started to take damage from the extreme heat of the water.
Thinking fast, she opened up her Shop and selected the membrane strength upgrade.
She’d already bought the upgrade once, but hopefully…
Yes!
The upgrade went through at the same price as before of 4 EP, and Lucy said goodbye to her little stockpile of points as the structure of her outer membrane reinforced itself, growing stronger and more resistant. It wouldn’t protect her as well as a specific heat-resistance mutation would, but right now she didn’t have a way to do that.
The upwards flow was also a lot faster than she had expected. Faster than it felt like she had ever moved in her life. The walls of the shaft flashed by her in a blur of grey stone that seemed to lighten in color as she went upward.
Lucy swam with it, adding her own meager strength to the force of the current. The main blast itself was just behind her, and the pressure increase as it began was enough to catapult her upwards.
[HP: 6/10]
Luckily, the upgrade seemed to be enough to keep her from getting killed outright, as long as she didn’t linger too long in the column of water.
She tried not to feel like a coward as she soared upwards, away from the dark pit below. Away from the light. Even if she’d only felt its blind touch on her cilia, it stung to have it gone.
Her intention was to stop at the side tunnel where she’d killed the spike monster, but the current had other plans, and Lucy wasn’t about to get roasted trying to slow down enough to make the ninety degree turn.
Of course, she didn’t want to get blasted out into the open ocean either, so as she swam with the current she kept her Awareness peeled for any upward-angled side tunnels that she could take without slowing down too much.
She missed her opportunity at the first one she came across, her mind still caught up in the memories of darkness below. She moved her cilia too slowly, and only ended up slamming into the wall.
[HP: 4/10]
Still getting used to the new wheels, I guess, she thought, shaking off the pain of the brunt impact.
The water around her grew uncomfortably warm, the main force of the blast below catching up a bit as she slowed. She imagined a steadying breath.
The next time, she was ready, focusing entirely on controlling her new cilia. It took far more effort than she expected just to move sideways in the current, but she managed to push herself far enough to shoot into the new tunnel instead continuing up the main shaft.
Her velocity decreased only slowly, and she had no idea how far she had travelled by the time she finally came to a stop. When she looked around, she could have groaned.
***
Despite the vast distance it seemed like she had travelled, Lucy was greeted with the exact same sight as before: jack-shit. A load of nothing. No food in sight.
The only novel thing she’d seen so far was a tendril of something that seemed to have worked itself into the walls in a certain spot like a root growing into stone, but she had no idea what it was, and it didn’t seem edible.
The water was still as she floated down the grey emptiness of the corridor, and her cilia moved her freely with no current to fight. She saw nothing in front of her, and nothing behind. Only the endless length of dark tunnel.
It was kind of depressing, to be honest. Except for the intermittent plant-tendril and the lighter color of stone, it didn’t feel much different from below.
Lucy had hoped after her first real fight and her first major upgrade that she would be the new big thing in these tunnels. She would stroll through knocking heads and gaining EP, cruising through to her first Evolution.
That was not the case, apparently. And it never would be if she died of hunger, of all things.
A pang rumbled her cytoplasm, and for the first time the thought crossed her mind that it was possible for her to die of something other than losing a fight. She could roam and roam through these tunnels and not see another living thing. She checked her energy, which continued to trickle downwards as her body repaired itself.
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[Energy: 17/100]
Death didn’t have to come for her in the form of some epic combat or even a sneaky surprise attack by a wily foe. It could come just from…not finding anything to eat. From nothing.
Lucy had eaten after the fight with the beaked organism, plopping down on top of the scavenger’s corpse and opening her membrane channels wide to filter in the nutrient-dense cytoplasm.
But there hadn’t been as much cytoplasm in the scavenger as she expected, and what was there had leaked out faster than she could eat. With no way to store it and no better way of absorbing it, Lucy had been left with a gnawing feeling of need after her adrenaline-fueled trip riding the blast upwards.
Maybe I should invest in the channel-efficiency upgrade after all.
Lucy got the sense that her organism had evolved as a simple filter feeder. Unfortunately, the only thing she seemed able to eat other than biological material was sulfur, and so far she hadn’t found somewhere with a dense or steady enough concentration for that to be a viable option.
Every movement she took brought her reserves of energy down just a bit further. If they ran completely out, she would just…stop, unable to carry on no matter how much she wanted to.
And producing the spike not only took energy, but some of her own proteins as well. Each time she had to make it anew, she was literally using up part of her own body.
In the murky depths of the endless corridor, that thought reminded her a bit too much of a situation from a Saw movie.
Lucy was not a fan of horror movies. As she’d learned one tired evening in college when her roommate had cajoled her into watching a deranged man in a creepy mask go around engineering increasingly disturbing situations.
I mean, the pit of needles thing was pretty fucked up, right? I guess that’s the point but…Lucy’s membrane shuddered.
No, she did not like watching horrifying things happen.
And she had no intention of watching them happen to her. She would make use of her body to form the spike as needed, but she had to be careful about when to use it, at least for now.
Of course, intention only counted for so much. At least with sulfur you could make sulfur-ade, but when life gave you nothing but empty tunnels…
Well, what can you do!? They’re freaking empty!
So Lucy kept moving, and tried semi-successfully to stop dwelling on such morbidities. Reality would provide plenty, she was sure.
She didn’t have to wait long to prove that thought true.
Despite the emptiness of the tunnel for the last however long she’d been swimming, Lucy felt every moment like something was going to jump out and attack her. She’d tried at first to maintain her appendage holding a spike in order to be ready for any attack, but as the hours had dragged on, it had simply drained her limited resources of energy too much.
Unfortunately for her, the weapon was apparently too unstable to maintain its form without direct contact with her membrane, so maintaining it added to the burden as well. Not that she had any pockets to keep it in anyways.
It was a great relief when her cilia finally picked up the vibrations of something scuttling around up ahead, and even moreso when she saw the lone bacteriophage up ahead.
Okay, just one. Good. She could handle that, right?
Wait, will I be able to eat that thing? It looks kind of tough.
Taking a steadying gulp of molecule interchange with the water around her, Lucy formed the spike inside herself again and grasped it with a newly formed hand before it could anchor into her outer membrane. The process was getting easier and quicker at least, even if it took a significant amount of energy.
Then the spider-like creature charged straight at her faster than she would have thought possible, and her sense of relief was replaced by a palpable terror that was quickly growing familiar.
The bacteriophage bore down on her, small but wickedly fast and nimble.
Maybe Lucy would direct horror movies when she made it back to being human. She was sure she’d have plenty of gruesome and creative images stored up by then. Fans would fawn over the grotesque scenes on the screen, asking how she could ever have come up with such things.
Oh, I’m just one of those creative types, she would say.
Lucy stabbed downwards with her spike, missing the bacteriophage by slivers as it dove for her. She pushed herself backwards in the water, but she was too slow to avoid the attack. The creature’s long, spindly legs pushed off from the stone and shot it forward like a loaded spring, catapulting straight for her.
She got a good look at the interesting anatomy of the creature as it stabbed a needle-like projection straight down, piercing her membrane.
The bacteriophage was perhaps a third of her size, which would have been scary enough for a regular spider. But it also had a watertower-like structure that rose up from its body; a structure Lucy happened to know was full of DNA that would seriously wound and possibly kill her.
She shook herself with all the force of an arachnophobic giving up the challenge on Fear Factor.
That didn’t do much, as the bacteriophage had already dug in with its legs and had a grip on her like clinging moss. Fortunately, she also had the presence of mind as she shook to swing upward with her appendage with all her strength, sending the spike she still gripped deep into the bacteriophage’s head.
Which promptly burst like a water balloon, sending the deadly DNA drifting out into the open water rather than injecting into her own body.
Lucy ripped the thing away from her and swam off as fast as she could. As hungry as she was and as low as her energy was getting, she didn’t think she’d be making a meal of this one. The deadly cloud of DNA was indeed the only thing that came out of the bacteriophage’s body, and even when it had dispersed, there were only hard bits left that she couldn’t eat without a mouth.
A short distance away, she waited, scanning the darkness around her for any sign of the symbols that her System used to communicate with her. Eventually, it appeared: a small shower of blue sparks flowing into her center.
She wasn’t sure why there was the delay between defeating something and getting the reward, but when she looked at the notification, all thought of the question left her mind.