My hurried retreat ended up taking me further into the wasteland. I had a good reason for this. After all, the colossal beasts might just be vegetarians, while I knew for certain the mantids wanted my flesh. Oh, and being so big I thought they wouldn’t even bother looking at me.

I turned out to be half right. Those giant beasts weren’t interested in me. The problem is that their passengers turned out to not be so picky. Not that I found that out right away. I was a decent way into the wasteland before I first got a taste of the suffering that would come.

Hole through the arm.

Now, that was a little sudden, wasn’t it? Well, let me tell you, it felt quite sudden for me as well! Stupid flea jumped at me and was not ready for how weak I turned out to be.

The damn thing barely missed the bone. Not that such a blessing would continue. The only savings grace was that the parasites preferred the enormous beasts almost to the exclusion of anything else.

Still, more than when I tortured myself, this was the tipping point that stripped me of my old body. Fleas, ticks, mites, and other more wriggly pests made themselves known. Limbs would shrink from blood loss and holes appeared in me, seemingly at random.

So I pulled more and more on my power. Over-drafting it again and again as the day passed, making up for the flesh and blood lost with the mysterious aqua gel that seemed to come from nowhere. By the end of the day, what remained of my limbs was held together purely by the gel.

Of my whole body, only my head stayed intact, the horns providing more protection than anyone would expect. I was quite the frightening scene. It honestly looked like some slime monster had absorbed my body and was part way through dissolving me.

There was one upside to this all. Well, I call it an upside now, at the time I was a bit distraught over it. Anyway, disconnecting those pesky human nerves really knocked the edge off the pain.

Not that I didn’t feel pain. It was still there, just less of an “Ow” and more of “Hey, there’s damage here, just so you know”. Heh, back then I worried that I would lose all feeling. Instead, this was a switching over from human limits to a nerve system more calibrated for a powerful regenerator.

Anyway, after wandering for a bit, I found a small spring fed pool. Oh, and almost died. Water was a bit rare and so there were a lot of bugs nearby. I ended up with a good 17 ping-pong ball sized holes in me all at once.

The only thing that saved me was how much of my body had been reduced to gel at that point. Only about five holes actually bled, and not much at that. So, while the other monsters came to attack me, it wasn’t quite a stampede.

This gave me both the chance to ready myself and close up a few of the more critical holes. You know, such as one right around where my heart should be. That hole had bled more than not.

Then the ticks were on me. Not literally, but they would be soon enough. My claws came out, covering up the fact that both hands should be missing a couple fingers each and I stepped back to ready myself.

The first few ticks were easy prey, their type more meant to hold on to things instead of hunting. Claws sliced through their weak exoskeletons as they mindlessly tried to chomp down on me. If only there weren’t so many of them!

Good news? They don’t particularly like my aqua gel. Bad news? I still had more than enough flesh that they kept coming.

I slashed and kicked, blocked and dodged. They just kept coming though and soon enough I could see the remnants of my human body begin to shrink and dry up. Now, some of you might assume this wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

After all, I do have a significant healing factor going on. Except, while I didn’t really have a feel for it at this time, there was a limit. I wasn’t sitting on some pool of infinite blue goop. If I wasn’t in the bigger war form, there would be more leeway.

As it was, though? My already groggy mind slipped deeper into darkness. Attacks became blunter. Defenses less solid. Then I fainted.

This was pretty traumatic. By all rights, I should have died. It wasn’t time to awaken a new power. I didn’t have some hidden well of potential waiting to be unearthed. To black out then should have been a death sentence.

My one saving grace was that I tasted bad and so the pests didn’t exactly rush to eat me. Now, I don’t know what happened but my assumption is that one of the colossal beasts stopped for some water and all my attackers decided that would be a better meal. And so it was that I woke up with both my few remaining human parts and my gel shriveled. Because, sure, they might not have liked the flavor, but it was still edible.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I wasn’t safe, though. The small spring was tapped out for the moment. However, given a little time, it would refill and attract a new parade of parasites. So yeah, I sort of needed to get out of there.

The problem with that is I also needed some of that water. Food as well, but I could tell my gel direly needed hydration. Not to say I’m made of water or anything so mundane! Trust me, the aqua gel isn’t of this world.

However, I will admit that replacing it works best when well hydrated. So, I dragged myself over to the muddy hole and waited. Of course, the wait wasn’t going to be peaceful.

Despite the mud being more dirt than water, there were enough critters perfectly fine with that situation. I could already see worms and their ilk making their way over to me. The real nasty kind too! These weren’t your common earthworms.

Now, technically, I didn’t know the exact details. But worms with nasty jaws? A clear sign of problems to come so I didn’t need those details.

Not that I had the option to retreat. Any watering hole with water included, would also have enough monsters to kill me. My back was to the wall and I needed to defend my place. Worse, I did not want to eat these nasties so there was nothing to gain from killing them.

At least with the mantises, I could imagine them as some sort of crustacean. These nasties, though? They’re parasites! The kind that even if they’re not meant for you, still mess you up something fierce if you aren’t careful.

Sure, I wasn’t exactly going to be infested by them, but hell no was I going to eat them! Who knows what nonsense they had? Maybe smaller parasites.

As far as I was concerned, better safe than sorry. Of course, I completely missed that if there were regular parasites, the mud pool would be a nest of them. That didn’t matter in the end, though.

I fought, my claws withered like a dessicated corpse yet still they sliced through the worms. Except they’re worms. Me slicing them in half? Like those fishers who wanted to reduce the number of starfish found out, it does the opposite of reducing the numbers.

Sure, dice them enough and they’ll die. I wasn’t getting the chance to do that. Instead, the worms ended up being split and guess what? Magic works on regeneration abilities in a very uncomfortable way. Oh, and it would be at this point that I realized that while my power did have hints of regeneration, that wasn’t the major thrust of it.

After all, those worms weren’t hiding an entire worm’s worth of material in them somewhere. So growing back, the missing pieces on both sides had to be pulled from somewhere. If I had the same ability, my claws wouldn’t be withered. Nah, I was the much more boring form of regeneration that didn’t get magically sped up like some sort of time lapse.

Anyway, try as I might, the worms wouldn’t die and those I did cut, healed before my very eyes. And as long as the piece I cut off was bigger than a foot in length? Well, that soon enough turned into two worms. So no matter what I tried, the small spring wasn’t something I could hold.

Then a silly thought hit me. I was fighting myself. Not literally, of course, but there I stood, someone with regeneration stuck fighting someone else with regeneration. Except, of course, the worms turned out to be better at it than me and I clearly wasn’t able to pull mass out of nowhere in the same way they could.

As much as it pained me to abandon the spring, the fight was going nowhere except my defeat and so I fought a careful retreat. Is what I would like to say, but not the truth. Instead, what happened is that I stumbled sideways until there wasn’t any mud behind me and then turned and ran. If I had been fighting anything besides worms, that would have probably been my end.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and it should be obvious with how easily I ran away, that there were other solutions. Stand and fight? Such a ridiculous idea! No, I should have put my superior movement to use to circle the mess and make sure those I struck had died. Oh well, most tend not to be born with combat instincts and I can’t blame myself for the inexperience.

What I can blame myself for is not heading back to the grass forest. I mean seriously, there might have been an absolute ton of mantises in there, but I could handle that and there was more than enough water. Hell, even being forced to eat a giant insect wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Well, out of the world because I certainly wasn’t in it at this point.

Anyway, there I was, thirst and running deeper into the unknown, because that always solves your problems. So yeah, I wasn’t completely without a plan. While I did avoid the grass forest, I paralleled it to an extent, hoping to find a better place to set up shop.

At this point, I had been in and out of consciousness enough to have no clue how long it was until an angry racist wizard found me. I could not even tell how closely the light cycle in the sky matched up with the 24 hour system I was used to. Either way, I need a place to set up shop and maybe some traps to even the playing field.

So, this is where dumb luck comes into play. I accidentally chose the right direction to run. See, me and Harold had ended up on opposite sides of the city. At the start, because I had walked straight away from the place, Harold had to choose a direction to circle the place and I had just started to run away from him instead of towards.

Even better? The edge of a new biome ended up being only a strenuous three and a half hour run away. Why did I run? Because I was chased. Not continuously, but those sky scraping behemoths shed fleas and such with every step so the entire cleared land turned out to be packed with them. It was hard to go a hundred feet without running into a parasite of some sort. So, adding in the occasional break, it actually took me four hours and change to reach the new biome. I also figured out that the concept of gradual transitions between biomes wasn’t going to be a thing here.