He could feel his body change and mutate, as more and more biomass entered his body. Even if it was only blood, this was the first time he had taken such an amount of biomass in a single consummation.

The man was no longer featherweight, the liters upon liters of blood increased his body weight to unprecedented heights. His body was mostly liquid at this point, and it was disturbing. Most of his total biomass was blood, followed by bones and later the skin. That couldn’t be healthy.

His body knew that and already began repurposing the nutrient-rich blood into flesh, but the procedure was too slow for his liking.

“There must be another way...” He looked at his broken left set of claws which had almost regenerated to their pristine state. “Hmm...”

Then he ripped the corpses with both of his claws, opening it in half. The anatomy of the wardens was wrong and nonsensical, but the man didn’t ponder on it, what mattered were the contents not the logic behind them.

Most of the wardens’ biomass was muscles. Tens upon tens of kilograms of pure and unadulterated muscles. No fat, just good red meat.

The man felt his mouth shift as it became bigger to fit the copious amount of meat he was shoving into his mouth.

It tasted horrible, and it was dry as he had already drunk all the blood that the muscles had once contained. Even then, such trivial things didn’t matter to him. Regaining biomass and recovering energy was his current objective, but those objectives themselves were just means to an end. His end goal was to escape from this prison.

As he finished his feast, the last traces of the wardens only being the bones and armor, he noticed he hadn’t seen any more wardens. That was both good and bad.

The man didn’t know how their patrols or schedule worked, mostly because he lost consciousness far before they switched wardens. And even then, these last two had stayed here for a very long time.

How much was that time, he couldn’t say.

There were no methods of measuring time here besides counting, and until now, he hadn’t had the brainpower to do so.

He stood up from his squat, flexing his newfound muscles. His body had become burly and big after having consumed the two carcasses. But instead of being twice as big as the wardens, he was currently smaller than what they had once been.

No biomass had been lost on the consumption...

He looked at the ground to see the plentiful amounts of white flesh and dark blood scattered around the floor.

Not MUCH biomass had been lost on the consumption, but the lack of volume was attributed to the control of his body. The wardens’ muscles were plentiful, but they weren’t as packed as they could be. After assimilating the two sets of muscles, he compressed them tighter into his muscles, not making him only stronger, but also far tougher.

The man thought about using the wardens’ armor but decided against it. Whilst he was around their size, the non-organic armor would severely limit his movements.

With quick and arbitrary calculations, he estimated he now had around twenty times as much strength as before. But not everything was an improvement. His weight had increased tenfold, and with this much biomass and tight muscles, he felt as if he wasn’t as agile as before.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

In the end, he considered the exchange of attributes worth it.

One couldn’t just be the perfect organism. If you wanted something, you had to trade it for something else.

He went into a crouch as he heard a noise. A hint of movement behind the constant whisperings of wind and death. It was difficult to see anything in the dark corridors, with no light sources around, but his eyes had been used to the darkness.

Not enough.

The man thought as his eyes began to wobble. The pupils stretched out and gained more color, hints of blood dripping around the cavities of the eye socket. The shifting wasn’t a painless process, especially on a sensitive organ such as the eyeballs.

He reshaped his eyes into ones he had once found. They were from a stealthy creature that was trying to hunt the twisted rodents in his cell. While the creature was an expert hunter, killing the rodents with swift and calculated strikes, it didn’t fare well against the man.

The eyes finally settled on a definitive form. Big eyeballs, vertical pupils, and green irises. It would be impossible for other creatures to know the color of their eyes, but for the man, it was instinctual. It was part of his body, how couldn’t he know it?

With his improved senses, the man looked down the corridor. There was no movement, but by the second, the noises were getting ever-so-louder.

In a single instant, he thought of a plan.

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The corridors were endless and silent, ignoring the cries of the damned, of course. After millennia, they couldn’t still comprehend the existence of prisons in the underworld. No one could escape, and even if they did, they were still dead.

When dead people traversed over the realm of the dead, they quickly degraded into undead. And most likely than not, mindless undead.

There were no reasons to have cells around. Their only job was to torture the damned until their existence vanished, and they went away. Where did the damned go after they collapsed? That they didn’t know. And they didn’t care. The torture was enough of a reward.

That’s why they always got mad when they took them out of torture duty, especially as simple lookouts.

They craved violence, it was literally written in their very being.

Though he could somewhat understand the existence of cells, some souls were especially weak to solitude. Leave them a few decades in a cell and they would disappear far faster than centuries of torture.

That took a lot of work out of the hands of the wardens, yes, but they loved that dirty and grimy work.

Even then, there was one prisoner that was not like the others. He wasn’t dead, but they couldn’t say if he was truly alive. The man had never been fed or given water, yet he never died, even after centuries. It was a weird specimen, to say the least.

And that’s why they hate it. They were ordered to watch the near-dead mortal for all of eternity, but they didn’t allow them to torture him. They didn’t know why. Wouldn’t it be easier to kill it? To make a damned?

Their thoughts stopped as they saw the dark spurt on the ground. On top of the stone bricks lay copious amounts of bones and blood. Plus two sets of armor.

They instantly raised their guard and looked at their fellow warden on the right, but instead, they saw a black blur.

On top of their mate was a creature of long ebony claws and red mane, glittering green eyes; and it was slicing the head of the warden into chunks.

They raised their axe, intending for a swift strike, but their eyes collided. Green physicality against grey spirituality. The abomination smiled and lurched toward them, claws forward in a menacing posture.

It all happened so fast.

What... That was the first thought they managed to form as their body began to spiral out of control. No. It wasn’t their body, it was their head. It had been separated from it as they saw the clean cut on the neck.

Darkness.

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Zero point three five seven seconds.

That was the time that it took him to descend from the ceiling into the head of the first warden and then use it as a boost to jump at the head of the second one. Only to slice its head clean in a single motion.

The man was happy after his brain finally moved at a decent speed. Reaction time was incredibly important when hunting after all. That is what marks the difference between prey and hunter.

It took a few more minutes to absorb the blood of the newly deceased wardens. This time he didn’t consume, the meat as he had reached a singularity point. Intaking more biomass would be detrimental to his current body. His bones would suffer under the pressure and his agility would be reduced even more.

Climbing to the ceiling and maintaining the silence had been complicated with a body this massive and burly.

The man cracked his neck and walked to where the wardens came from in the hopes of finding an exit from this dark and gelid prison.