She wasn’t sure how much good it would do against such thin and fast foes, but she wasn’t about to be left defenseless if her first plan of attack failed.
Equalizing her pressure, she waited for a moment that felt like an eternity as the swarm closed in. Just before their snapping jaws were close enough to reach her, she released the enzymes she had stored in her fungal vacuole, flooding the water with the destructive cloud of liquid.
She concentrated the blast forward, keeping it from spraying out all around her, which would dilute its effectiveness to her enemies and possibly harm Rikorlak and the red-membraned microbe, who were still floating behind her, too surprised to move.
As the worms flew heedlessly into the cloud of enzymes, Lucy pushed herself backwards, watching carefully to see the effect of her attack even as she formed a second appendage.
If they make it through, I’ll grab them one at a time to hold them still enough to stab.
She felt good about the plan. Her hit points had doubled with her first Evolution, and she could feel the improved strength of her membrane, interwoven as it now was with strands of hyphae.
The worms’ mouths looked large enough to latch on to her, but their teeth were tiny, and she thought she had a good chance of killing them one at a time even if her enzyme attack failed.
But as she watched and waited, nothing emerged from the dense cloud of milky enzymes, and after a moment, she saw the first corpse drift slowly down to the stone below, followed soon after by the others.
Then a single straggling worm came at her from the side, avoiding the fate of its brethren by luck.
When it reached Lucy only to find itself a lone attacker, it quickly squirmed around and tried to swim back to the cave for safety.
Lucy winced as the worm swam straight into the enzymes, then dropped dead to the ground.
Huh. That was…pretty easy, actually.
Even as she had the thought, tiny sparks of blue light flowed into her center from the corpses of the worms, awarding her 7 EP.
Not bad at all, for winning a fight with a single attack. Lucy was impressed. She had harbored a concern that she’d need a different enzyme for every foe she fought, but apparently mixing together a cocktail of all the membrane-dissolving ones she knew about worked just fine.
And, importantly, it didn’t harm her to use them. Lucy had proceeded with extreme caution the first time she’d used the fungus-killing enzyme to help the other microbes, but it hadn’t even hurt her new cilia. Apparently, the joining of the fungus to her membrane changed her structure enough to give her some level of immunity.
Rikorlak approached, waving away the last haze of enzymes with his large fin.
“Well, that worked nicely.”
Lucy nodded, already looking eagerly toward the cave that had drawn her here in the first place. There could be more swarms of worms there, and if they all died so quickly, it would make for some easy points. It took a good amount of energy to produce the volume of enzymes she had used, but already she could feel her new symbiotic system hard at work filtering the water around her and drawing in nutrients.
Despite her excitement, Lucy forced herself to slow down as she approached the entrance. It was just as possible there was something truly nasty and dangerous hiding in there, so she moved with caution.
As she held up the spike in front of her body, she found herself wishing for some sort of shield. She System said she had the Protective Barrier skill, but so far, hadn’t been able to learn anything about it.
She would delve into that soon, she decided, along with any other changes her Evolution had wrought.
But first, the cave.
Swimming the last short distance upward to the crevice in the stone, Lucy strained her Awareness to see if there were any threats lurking in the depths of the cave, which seemed to extend deeply into the stone.
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Seeing nothing, she moved forward.
Because she didn’t see by light, Lucy perceived the interior of the cave as no darker than the open water she’d been swimming in before. But the walls curved and twisted sharply, and she found herself having to turn awkwardly as she tried to see farther in.
But nothing attacked her. No hidden creatures jumped out in ambush or roared out from the depths.
The only problem was that the cave just kept going.
The original crevice soon opened up into a larger chamber, but that chamber itself split off in a half-dozen directions. Some of the tunnels were too small even for her to fit, but all of them led deeper, winding their way far into the stone face of the cliff.
Putting aside that issue for a moment, Lucy looked around with a trained eye, searching for evidence that any lifeforms had been living here. Or more importantly, that any might be coming back.
There were scuffs and scratches along the walls, and the ground was littered with bits of inedible organic matter accumulated into large piles. In places, it was so thick as to cover the ground entirely.
She sifted through the piles, poking them with her dagger to separate out the pieces.
Mostly, she found the tiny teeth of the worms, along with some stiff scraps of membrane that she didn’t recognize. All of it seemed quite old, though it was hard to tell for sure.
As Rikorlak and the red-membraned microbe worked their own way slowly in behind her, Lucy reevaluated.
This does not feel safe.
If it had been just this one chamber, she would have been comfortable taking the risk that another organism might come knocking. That would still be better than trying to rest out in the open.
But the branching tunnels leading off from the main room were a deal-breaker. Lucy started to go down one of them, only to find that it continued farther than she could swim in a few minutes.
Lucy didn’t know much about battle tactics, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea to make your camp in a room that had a bunch of holes monsters could pour through at any moment.
Damn, this would’ve been great otherwise, assuming nobody out on a hunting trip came back through the front.
She stifled a sigh and started to make her way out of the cave again, when she saw Rikorlak examining one of the side-tunnel openings in the wall.
“Unless you’ve got some 2 by 4s and stone screws,” she deadpanned, “it seems like we’ll need to keep looking.”
It was a shame, but hardly the biggest setback Lucy had experienced so far.
“Well, no screws,” Rikorlak replied seriously. “But…” He turned to the red-membraned microbe. “Do you think…?”
He let his unfinished question hang in the water, and Lucy watched in confusion as the other microbe’s membrane flushed a deeper shade of red. Then the smaller microbe nudged Rikorlak back out of the entrance, where Lucy could almost make sense of the conversation taking place.
She edged a bit closer to the entrance, telling herself she just wanted to poke through one of the piles again.
“It’s embarrassing!” the childish voice of the microbe protested.
“It could be very helpful,” Rikorlak said gently. “And among my kind, it’s quite normal for young fry to produce odorous secretions to keep predators at bay! And while I’ve never heard of—”
“I don’t know what that means!”
“Right. Well, the point is, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It is a natural function of your body, and it could be very helpful to all three of us right now, if you want to try.”
Lucy heard a sigh.
“I wanted to help with fighting, not plugging up holes!”
“It’s up to you,” Rikorlak assured.
After a moment, the red-membraned microbe appeared in the entrance.
Lucy had been straining her membrane for incoming communication molecules, and gave a guilty start at the appearance, but the microbe was already talking.
“Alright,” they grumbled, as Rikorlak came back in as well. “I’ll try. But I’ve only been able to do this once, so it might not work. And if it does work, well, I warned you.”
They wrinkled their membrane at Rikorlak, who nodded encouragingly.
Then they stilled completely, membrane smoothing.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
They began to shake slightly in the water, and just as Lucy was about to interrupt in concern and ask what was going on, small, shining red droplets of liquid began to form, holding their shape even as the microbe shook with effort in the water.
More droplets appeared, along with a harsh, overwhelmingly acrid smell that filled the room and made Lucy instinctively close her membrane channels. Eventually, Rikorlak swam over to one of the piles of detritus and picked up a large scrap of stiff membrane, which he used to carefully scrape up some of the shining red liquid from the microbe’s membrane.
Then he smeared the slimy liquid all over the rest of the pile, awkwardly adding other bits from the ground to the sticky conglomeration.
“This would really be easier with hands,” he said apologetically. “Would you mind?”
“Oh…sure!”
At this point Lucy thought she understood what Rikorlak had in mind, so she moved to help him, using her hands to add more detritus or red slime as necessary.
It wasn’t until she got closer that she realized the strange tingling, burning sensation along her cilia was coming from the red slime the microbe had produced.
Huh, must be some sort of defense mechanism, she mused. Sure smells like one.
Before long their mass of sticky trash was large enough, and Lucy picked it up and maneuvered it to one of the smaller side-tunnels.
Definitely defensive! she thought, feeling a strong burning sensation wherever the liquid came in contact with her membrane.
Lucy shoved with all her strength to smush the sticky mass into place, where it stuck firmly, blocking off one of the side-tunnels completely.
Not bad, she thought. We’ll have to see how much it holds together over time, but it seems pretty good.
She poked the squidgy mass, then noticed the red-membraned microbe. They had slumped to the ground, but seemed to be watching Lucy for her reaction.
“Well,” she said slowly, pulling back a sizzling hand and looking at the mounds of detritus that still filled the room. “I guess we’ve found our camp!”