Chapter 3: You can hear me now? ca*-an**’t you?!

Mitch stood there gaping at the bear. If you could really call it that… The creature had some distant ancestor in the ursidae family but gun pointed to his head, Mitch would not tell you this abomination in front of him was truly a bear. Beyond the fact that the creature was encased in a layer of frosted blue ice multiple inches thick on all sides; and that below it’s transparent armor it’s hair was constantly in a state of flaming ember. No, those were just irrelevant details to the true problem here… This abomination was so large it was taking up eighty percent of the volume of the roomy cave exit. The temperature abomination was at least twelve feet across shoulder to shoulder, and at least a whopping twenty four feet in length.

The abomination seemed to be coming bored of growling. So bored in fact, it decided to trigger whatever abomination of a hologram rune it summoned. From the wavy projection something peculiar happened… The air around Mitch rose around forty degrees bringing the surrounding air to a toasty ninety degrees fahrenheit in an instant.

Well this isn’t so bad! Just suddenly a nice summer day in this forsaken cave. The contrast is magnificent. Wait… why is the hologram still getting brighter?

The bear abomination swiped at the rune, its claws outstretched. It was almost as if the bear was trying to tear apart Mitch from a distance.

Mitch decided to not take any chances and dove to the side. A split second later, Mitch heard a loud crash and shatter. Chunks of hard material battered his backside. He glanced over at the deadend, where he was just standing moments before and saw a pile of flaky white ice.

The small mountain of ice was slowly sublimating into white gas revealing gray rocky debris within. Above the ice pile was a four foot deep crater dug into the sturdy stone walls of the cave.

Errr, that seems survivable? I think. I really should’ve spent that week running around the ruins testing my impact ratings. My brain took the daily aches and pains of integration as an excuse to double down on my gambling, drinking, smoking, and gaming. Ah the good ol days.

Why does the bear smell so heavenly? And what the fuck is that noise? It’s getting on my nerves.

Ohhhhh. Fuck.

Mitch realized he was hearing a loud buzzing noise of a drone closing in on the cave entrance. A half second later a fluorescent white light blasted down the passageway. It nearly blinded Mitch, the abomination seemed unfazed.

“Citizen of the empire, under code 83222b23, you’ve been charged with destruction of property and homicide of an empire droid. Mortal acolyte, you shall be procured and brought before a Judicon! The celebrant shall set the foundation of your retribution!” The drone announced in a voice not entirely robotic, undertones of a concerningly human religious tone leaking though.

The drone inadvertently distracted the abomination from the slightly concussed Mitch Korrigan. Some rock shrapnel from the ice explosion earlier gave the back of his head a good beating. The bear and rune swiveled towards the entrance of the cave that Mitch came through hours earlier. Mitch currently around the corner could not see the drone, but given the sheer volume of buzzing noise, it had to be massive.

The abomination lazily raised a paw and hit the floating rune like a drum, three times in quick succession. From the large rune a dozen feet across, three smaller red runes spawned and shot down the corridor like falcons chasing prey.

A split second later, the sound of the drone’s spinning blades were no more, instead was a deafening impulse of ice crackling noise. Mitch saw a small avalanche of sharp chunks of ice bounce down the hall past the bear, but it was obvious that was only a fraction of what was spawned.

Quick superspeed planning session. What the fuck do I do? Can’t get past the fatty, he’s taking up the entire side of the cave. Can’t go past the drone, I go back to climbing that cliff decent chance a capture drone will swoop by, put me into temporary stasis and i’ll get a nice ass fucking of retribution. Whatever that means. I’d very much rather not find out.

Following a crack of thunder, a flash of plasma and a sonic boom. The pondering Mitch was catapulted backwards into the deadend crater by a flaky ball of ice exploding on his chest at mach two.

The abomination now had its full undivided attention on Mitch, it had only taken the bear two seconds to neutralize the drone.

Mitch gasped for breath, the ice forcefully knocked the wind out of him. Another internal bruise was quickly forming at impact.

Ow! shit, that just reopened my back scab. I wish this graphene layer was more flexible, sure it stops shit from penetrating but instead I get thigh sized bruises! If I hadn’t sprung for the cadherin synthetic binding protein, my entire chest cavity would be mush from that strike. Instead my every organ is jiggling around my ribcage like a block of military grade jello wobbling everywhere nauseously, bleeding in some places. Mitch focus! Puke guts up later. Plan one, try energy rife. Plan two, rock test then fission grenade. Plan three, try sliding under the icy bastard?

Mitch tensed his legs launching himself out of the crater just in time to avoid another volley of supersonic ice balls which cracked against the stone like supercharged frag grenades.

Mitch whipped the ‘MK3833 Niatech energy assault rifle’ off his shoulder, the shitty strap somehow stayed on during Mitch’s mad dash up the cliff earlier. Mitch sighted the bear behind the rune and pulled the trigger. He was ready to get himself some game! But… Nothing happened. The rifle just made a low beep, a block of text appeared on the ammo counter lcd screen and Mitch swore.

‘Your free trial of the Niatech energy rifle has expired! Please log into the neuralnet portal to renew your license! Niatech is always the best! Add more than 10,000 rifles to one account and get a fifty percent discount!’

What cheap backwater knockoff is this?! Was this a civilian rifle? Who the hell would buy a rifle with a subscription on it?!

The bear’s giant rune was nowhere in sight after Mitch glanced back up after looking at the assault rifle display. Although… the ceiling seemed oddly bright, and red?

Suddenly the ceiling was a brilliant brilliant blue instead of red. Following another abomination paw gesture the air around Mitch suddenly wasn’t ninety degrees fahrenheit… it was two hundred and ninety degrees celsius. Mitch saw red. Not a good red, a bloody red.

Mitch screamed, closed his eyes and bolted, his legs carrying him full speed into the deadend crater filled with ice. Unfortunately for Mitch, The awful blue rune was tracking him, the temperature scorched his remaining epidermis into a bubbling burn within seconds. By the time Mitch had reached the human sized pile of ice, he could no longer see through one of his eyes he kept slightly ajar to navigate. The entire visual field was blurry and warped from the heat turning his left cornea into a cooked crinkly sheet. His skin was a red boiling mess.

Mitch dove into the white ice. It was stupidly cold, almost mind blowingly cold. A split second later Mitch realized this wasn’t dry ice, it was concerningly brittle and cold, it was nitrogen ice. The abomination froze the air itself. But the momentary release from the heat was short lived as within seconds Mitch could feel his hands and feet the closest to the ice surface start burning once again.

Alright, plan two! This one better work! If this last niatech fission grenade doesn’t go off due to a subscription issue, I’ll track down their CEO and sell his organs to afford my subscriptions.

Mitch retracted his limbs, quickly covered himself in chips of nitrogen ice rolling around in the supercooled particle pile.

Mitch clawed his way out of the ice chip pile just as enough of the ice sublimated to expose his wrists and ankles. At this point, the heat blasting from the rune above had turned the epidermis on his hands and feet to a thin layer of char.

The doctor ignored the shooting pains going through his hands and feet, gritted his teeth and began to pull. He launched out of the ice chip pile at nearly fifty miles an hour, this was just enough speed for him to start feeling cool blasts of air buffett his frontside as the heating rune tracked his back. Without the heat buffering his front, Mitch was finally able to open his eyes fully and look ahead of him. It was at this point his khakis and trench coat caught fire, the building heat enough for the cotton content to spontaneously combust.

Mitch ignored the flames, his eyes dead set on sticking this grenade up this bear abomination’s ass. With a blurring right hand Mitch withdrew the fission grenade from his side pocket and twisted the timer ring with the friction of his thumb to the five second mark.

Should be enough time to get out of the instant death blast radius and only lose the rest of my skin. Good enough.

The abomination immediately noticed the flaming Mitch Korrigan flying towards it like a missile. It did not summon another volley of holograms, nor did it call back the one tracking Mitch. Instead, the abomination whilst Mitch was a yard away lazily lifted its right paw, frost covered claws outstretched. Then, with no warning, snakes of pure glowing plasma shot out of its claws like steel piercing shaped charge explosives directly towards Mitch.

The plasma appeared abruptly and expanded at thirty times the speed of sound. Mitch took all four snakes directly center mass, the heat so massive it instantly flash boiled the skin on his chest. The graphene below turned a bright emissive red, the material began wicking away the four hotspots within milliseconds but it was enough to start cooking the doctor’s internal organs.

Mitch screamed in pain, sure he’d dealt with pain in vr sims, a lot of it in fact, but he was not immune nor a psychopath. It felt as if someone was directly applying four jaw red hot iron skillets to his chest muscles.

Mitch spasmed. His right hand cramped ajar from the shock, releasing the fission grenade. It rolled below the abomination slowly, disappearing from the doctor’s view as it tumbled under the creature’s chest.

Mitch tumbled and fell right in front of the abomination, his mind foggy, the heating rune had caught up to him the moment he landed, his eyes started to boil and fog once again, he had to close his eyes. Just as he closed his eyes he felt sharp points and a blunt shock trying to penetrate his protection. Squinting his eyes open a crack he saw the bear slamming its right paw into his chest, its nails glowing a bright orange.

Ugh, Wait… Where’s the grenade?!

Mitch attempted to scramble to his feet, he felt four scorching marks streak down his back as even more of his burt bubbly skin was sloughed off by the glowing claws. Mitch tensed his graphene musculature legs as hard as he could, launching himself out of the bear’s reach. He could feel the cool cave air beginning to buffet his entire body.

Ahhh, that feels nice.

Suddenly a shockwave shook Mitch’s chest, and he felt his eardrums instantly burst. He noticed thick blood beginning to pool in his ear canals. The pain and deafness overwhelmed his screaming as he was rocketed towards the gigantic ice pile holding the captured and demolished drone. He was blasted backwards along with stone and icy debris launched by the nuclear shockwave, he made it around ten yards away from the grenade before the secondary godly explosion of light and heat hit his back from the plasma ball behind him.

To say the least, Mitch was now a black man, a black man with skin so rough he could be mistaken for burt BBQ. A split second later he felt the cold shock of near absolute zero nitrogen ice chips making their presence known.

Mitch shuttered in the ice chips, the feeling in his skin was now thoroughly gone, but thankfully as he slowly cracked open his new black paperthin eyelids he could see! If a bit blurry due to the retinal damage from the heat rune following him around.

After positive all of the residual heat on his skin and exposed graphene dissipated into the ice seconds later. Mitch once again clawed himself out of an ice chip pile for the second time within the last two minutes. As he shakily stood on the cold cave floor, the first thing he noticed was that it was terribly dark and smoke clogged. The only source of light was the red glow emanating from a twenty foot across crater where the abomination used to be. And second he noticed, he was god damn ravenous. And third, the cave smelled like charred skin and cooked meat.

After with crusted hands turning on the flashlight setting on the holo-skin, Mitch made his way over to the bear crater. The holo skin screen glass had seen better days but the stretchy nanotube laced belt was holding up fine.

Looking down into the crater Mitch saw a now iceless and hairless bear the size of a semi truck sunken into the ground. On second look, it wasn’t sunken into the ground, instead its legs, lower torso, abdomen and lower jaw were all gone. The gaping slice in its bottom must’ve been cauterized too as too little blood was leaking out of the bottom.

Am I breathing in smoke that used to be bear penis? Actually don’t answer that.

Is that thing still alive?!

Mitch could see the abomination straining to move around its jawless skull in the crater.

Mitch also spotted one of the claws of the bear embedded in the stone wall behind him. Mitch leveraged the sharp object out of the shattered granite. Mitch’s charred and numb hand was not able to register how smooth the object was.

Mitch hopped down on top of the bear and drove it’s claw through it’s right eye as deep as it could go. The object was sharp and hot enough to drive through the bear’s orbital bone like warm butter and eviscerate the bear’s brain. The bear’s struggle came to an abrupt end.

Time to dig in.

Mitch dug out a large combat switchblade out of his charred, flaking apart trench coat. He felt the damned thing drive into his ribs earlier when impacting the ice.

Thank you whatever cunt left their knife in here.

Mitch began slicing steaks of cooked bear meat out of the creature, he did not hesitate to begin digging in, his hard graphene teeth making quick work of the gamey meat. As the first slab of back muscle hit his stomach Mitch immediately saw a mental flash of the inner workings of his entire body. The most interesting section was the sheer number of stem cells recruited to regenerate his skin. On the second pulsing view of his body, Mitch managed to see the red blood cells pooling in his small intestine begin wicking away drops of digested fats, amino acids, and… familiar weird pulsating crystals.

Mitch’s high speed digestive system then slid the next section of mushy bear meat into his gut and Mitch got a third pulse of his internals. He could see those weird pulsating crystals, which he saw earlier in the vulture he ate, yet these bear crystals seemed to be supercharged.

Mitch watched as the crystals were being transported to every section of his body, the cell walls letting the substance through with no resistance. But upon another pulse of internal clarity Mitch saw that his spinal column and brain were devouring the crystals at high speed. The pulsating crystals would dissolve in the lipids surrounding his dendrites in the central nervous system then transform into small amounts of ethereal green gas. The gas refused to dissolve into the blood or neurons but phased through Mitch’s brain matter. The gas didn’t just float upwards aimlessly, it was shooting around his skull and spine like a second layer of neuronal signals then disappeared into his brainstem.

Mitch felt like he was on cloud nine. His flashlight of mental focus had extinguished, he was stuck reveling in the new sensations. But his body did not stop moving, even while his mind was not there, his body demanded more meat.

With every slab of bear meat, the crystal pulsating sixth sense would become more and more frequent. At first it was every two seconds, at the fifteen pounds of meat mark, it had reached a pulse every tenth of a second.

Mitch’s mental faculties were drowning in the fractal that was his own inner workings. It was at this point the brain stem singularity stopped drawing in green gas. A nanosecond after, the point of glowing gas in Mitch’s brainstem exploded. The ball of concentrated neon green split into trillions of confusing curvy lines and nodes. Only half of the ethereal nodes of the network were embedded in the existing neurons of Mitch’s brain, the rest were grouped into a dense network of points in his prefrontal cortex. The grouped nodes fired off higher intensity light pulses as communication. The neuron embedded nodes also reacted to Mitch’s biological firings. An odd calibration sequence originating from the new ghostly brain network sent tingling across every part of Mitch's body, tingling places that had never tingled before. After the tingling, the network of nodes started demanding more green gas. After it was supplied, a sharp spear of green gas tinged with flecks of purple shot out of the network and smashed into the fabric of reality itself and opened a subatomic portal inside Mitch's brain to another point in the universe. A tight bundle of green gas tethers the size of a proton slipped into the portal, and began relaying a stupidly high rate of information back to the newborn network.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

Mitch was fully unaware of these happenings beyond the odd tingling sensations before the sixth sense stabilized. The world of biology unfurling in his mind's eye. So much information flooded Mitch’s brain at once it was like listening to ear piercing white noise at full blast.

A certain noise managed to cut through the noise: a voice. A voice familiar yet so distorted Mitch was unsure of the owner.

“-*n, you can hear me now? ca*-an**’t you?! Li****n the Empire is our ho*e. Kill your way b*ck, the name of *or**ans spreads unerringly **o*g the stars. Take your birthright, find me in la*er two, sector 83bb**. Your family is dan*er*u*, do not hesita*e. Vultures no matter how familiar are nothing but free meat. W* -*ve t** po-*r o* gods. Bui-- a n-ur-l --two-k wor--y o- --. Assimilate, replicate, control. Do not forget.”

The voice ended in an explosion of mental static which sent Mitch fumbling to the ‘ground’. Mitch convulsed, his nubile pink and raw skin rubbing against the bloody back of the abomination. The secondary network shooting through his brain was still firing off signals with a vengeance. It almost seemed offended. Mitch’s consciousness began slipping from reality.

----------------------------------------

Mitch screamed, he blinked his eyes, they were dripping blood. His eardrums had regenerated. He looked down, half of the remaining bear was gone, its upper back and internal organs picked clean. Mitch rolled off of the now partially hollow rib cage. In too much mental turmoil to stand up.

The view of his own body was not the only problem since the network connected, he could feel everything living around him for a dozen feet. The bacteria, viruses, the abomination’s cells and bugs crawling on the walls all around. The sheet information overload was killing him, so much new stimulus his brain couldn’t focus on his regular senses. He was able to see, but his brain was so uncaring of the familiar stimulus he couldn’t process any of the visual information. His consciousness was beginning to slip once again.

Oh no you don’t you fucking bitch. We stand now or we’ll end up in stasis! As I said, that’s not going to happen!

With a jolt of adrenaline, Mitch slammed his hands into the ground, a pushup like motion launching him to his feet.

My fucking head. What did that voice even say? Something about meat I'm pretty sure? And… sector 83bb something? Either way that doesn’t follow federation sector naming standards whatsoever? Why did it sound so familiar?

Mitch shook his head trying to clear his brain of the mind melting migraine. The migraine was completely unpreventable as the sheer amount of stimulus pumped in from Mitch’s new sixth sense did nothing but overwhelm his brain.

Why are there bacteria and viruses everywhere?! At least I can vaguely sense the outlines of the cave via connecting the tarp of wriggling alive dots lining the walls.

I can see my crystal reserves slowly being pumped up my spine, probably will last around seven days from how it looks. I wonder if I can stop the flow? Wouldn’t be that weird with how much bullshit I'm going through today.

Proceeded to try mentally wrangling the crystals with a mental shovel and knock swaths of the crystals out of this blood stream into surrounding cells. But unsurprisingly that did jack shit, just because Mitch could see his own blood stream didn’t mean he could ... .uhhh… Mitch watched on as his mental micro shovel phased through the crystals and bashed a macrophage white blood cell into the wall of his blood vessels exploding it into goop. The goop was quickly cleaned up by another one of the cell’s brethren.

I can smack my own cells with a mental shovel, so helpful. Wish I could turn off this mental overload of a sphere. I also… don't feel full somehow. I know my gi tract is fast, but not that fast. I just ate half a fucking bear. Where did all of the shit go? I must’ve shat by now surely?

As Mitch thought of his excrement he spotted a large pile of excrement with matching bacteria to his gut biome leaning against the side of the bear.

I would wipe my ass with the bear’s fur, but the bear’s hair is already in the afterlife. It's been at least a dozen minutes and that giant plug of ice that smashed the drone seems to be going nowhere. I might as well finish the bear meat? Who knows when I'll get my next meal?

Mitch proceeded to dig into his cooked meat pile, one that used to look vaguely like a bear. The experience was entirely foreign to the previous one. This time around with every slab of meat he could individually count every single cell in the slabs, he could see the bacteria killing off the nutrient deficient immune cells, could see the muscular cells dissolving from the lack of oxygen and blood flow. As the meat slabs went down into his stomach, he was able to see his modified stomach acid start popping cell walls in the billions.

Mitch quickly skinned, butchered and ate most of the musculature of the bear within the next fifteen minutes. He worked from the lower thighs up to the head. As he was a foot away from the bear’s brain picking off the flabs of face fat to eat, the secondary network on top of his brain flared. It gave him a massive compulsion to crack the skull open and eat the aboimations’s brain like a jelly bowl.

Agahhh, brains. Cough. I mean, those brains would be high in fat. Surely the creature didn’t have brain worms or anything? Wait why am I even wondering, I can see its neurons from here.

After looking around the bear’s skull for a paranoid two minutes Mitch decided to go for it, the compulsion too strong to ignore.

Mitch pulled out the combat knife he clipped onto his khakis now as the trench coat was on the verge of flaking off of him. With the other hand he pulled out the claw stuck in the skull. Mitch pried out the other eye from the left eye socket using the knife, he tried at first to just stick the knife under the eye and pry it out like a bouncy ball stuck in a divot, but the damned thing burst. The eye sprayed goop across the knife and up Mitch’s arm, for some awful reason probably just to spite the bloody Mitch, the abomination’s eye was extremely pressurized.

Why didn’t the other one spurt like that? Post mortem decay? Seems awfully fast.

Thinking nothing more of it Mitch scraped out the remains of the eye from the eye socket, blood and goop staining his knife. After scraping the eye remains down to the bone, he marked mentally where the orbital bone was weakest through his sixth sense, he placed the tip of his knife and slammed the back with the palm of his other hand, hard. A soft crack occurred, the knife sunk four inches through the bone creating a ragged and sharp cut. More blood dribbled out of the brain into the socket along with some watery cerebrospinal fluid. Not nearly as bad as Mitch expected as he had already mostly drained the skull earlier with his mercy kill.

Mitch identified two more weak spots at the lower back of the skull and with four horizontal holes in the skull Mitch was able to crack and pry the rest of it off using the claw and knife as leverage.

I could’ve just ripped the damn skull cap off, but I'd rather try to reduce the number of bone spurs getting into my mouth. If I'd just torn the thing off quickly there’d one hundred percent be chunks of bone in my jello dish.

Mitch finally saw the brain with his two eyes. Sike, it was way too dark in the cave, but he was able to easily tell it was in front of him given the overwhelming sixth sense. The other odd thing was that the brain and spine of the bear still seemed almost alive? They were both still slowly absorbing crystal traces from the remaining blood and organs. Every time a large enough crystal hit the bear’s brain or spine he saw a microscopic jiggle and some sort of multidimensional shutter? It was like the brain refused to shut down so it was throwing some sort of quantum hissy fit.

I have no fucking idea what i’m looking at. I know the basis of consciousness and anesthesia is quantum based on microtubules, but that’s beyond my paygrade. Did not bother getting the dual degree in quantum mechanics and advanced biology to understand that one. Starting to regret it right now. Looks safe enough? What’s a little bit of microtubules gonna do to me? I gotta get moving real soon, I'm starting to hear buzzing even through the ice.

Mitch gave up on his facade of civility and began taking handfuls of the pink and red brain matter and shoved it into his mouth.

Wow I barely need to chew, it’s extra fatty but not the chewy pork fat type of way. Like loose unorganized fats which with the slightest pressure split apart into smaller tasty jello chunks lining your mouth. Lots of umami as well. Man, I should go for another bear brain in the future… Mitch noticed the secondary crystal induced neural network of his was going absolutely crazy. Ooohkay maybe not.

The bear meat hit Mitch’s gut after twenty seconds of being attacked by superacid and as it hit his stomach, pure euphoria flooded his brain. Mitch was catching glimpses of oddly differently shaped glowing threads smaller than subatomic particles pulled from the neuron’s protein microtubules being devoured. The strands were not entering his bloodstream. They were shooting directly into his millions of gut nerves lassoed up and guided forward by thick clouds of metaphysical dark green gas. The strands were being shot through the neural highway that was his spine up to his brain.

Before he knew it, Mitch had managed to finish the bear brain. The headache that was pestering him so dreadfully was now cut to a fifth of the previous annoyance. It seemed whatever those strands were they drastically helped the information overload Mitch was experiencing.

His sixth sense world began to stabilize, Mitch korrigan, bear corpse, trillions of bacteria, car sized ant.

Wow, for the first time I can appreciate this view! Also did it expand by a foot in every direction? I don’t remember being able to sense an ant from here. It’s really annoying though, if I let my focus linger on any part of my body, the dead bear’s or that ant, my brain starts hurting. Too much information of all of the trillions of molecules sending status reports. I can look at the bacteria just fine… Huh, I wonder, Mitch mentally squinted his sixth sense just to focus on one of his dermis skin cells. The headache quieted, he was no longer aware of the world around him but he just checked, there’s only him, a corpse and an ant. Nothing to worry about.

Mitch’s sixth sense condensed onto the skin cell, only the faintest view of the thirteen foot circle around him made it to his brain. He watched in fascination as the cell seemed to be preparing for mitosis, Cyclins and kinases proteins preparing DNA for replication. P53 proteins being produced intersposing themselves into the dizzying protein dance, working to stop any DNA damage. Rb proteins modulating the activity of E2F transcription factors.

The next phase of replication of the cell started heating up, DNA polymerase springing into action to start carrying out the synthesis of new DNA strands. MCM helicase proteins began unwinding the double DNA sequence.

Mitch’s sixth sense world view suddenly expanded as the ant knocked him off his feet. It’s mandibles dripping venom closing around his neck. The mandibles found no purchase.

“I don’t remember you being so ugly… and large.” Mitch blurted out, his sixth sense and eyes now showing him, the ant shape he ignored earlier was actually the size of a volkswagen beetle and not a biological beetle.

The ant venom sloughed off streaks of Mitch’s skin, as if an acid. Snapping out of his stupor Mitch finally decided to fight back. He grabbed the two manables of the ant and used them as two large handles to flip the ant onto its side with a massive heave. One of the bastard’s thin legs on the right side snapped off from the roll. The damned thing screeched like a bird, Mitch decided he’ll be killing this thing as fast as possible.

Why is the ant extra hard to look at? It looks fuzzy in my sixth sense, as if there's the faintest amount of TV static blasting my brain if I look too far in. Mitch muscled the sense into his control squinting and staring at the tv static for a second until he spotted a pattern to its flow. His secondary layer of neurons squirmed. Suddenly it was as easy to look at the ant’s insides as his own or the bear corpse. The static, nowhere to be seen.

Perfect, that nerve cord only looks around a hundred and sixty cells across. If I do remember my insect biology, that’s its spinal cord. Too bad bugs can breathe paralyzed. Eh, I'll take paralyzed.

Mitch with zero hesitation tried smacking the ant’s spine with one of his cell slaps. Mitch felt his brain get a bit warm as a small green circular rune the size of a pingpong ball appeared on his forehead. The rune was a simple jagged circle, wavering in multidimensional winds with a smaller circle jutting out of the center connected with wavy glowing lines. The small circle sucked out a tic tac sized ball of ephemeral green gas directly from his brain. As soon as the stuff hit open air and passed through the rune it rushed towards the ant like a rabid animal, attracted to his target as if a homing missile.

The ping pong sized ball of meta gas slowed down going through the ant as if it were going through a pool of water. Mitch squinted, it looked like the nerves in the ant’s body were flooding the body with white gas to catch the rogue projectile. The density of the gas seemed to do little to stop the momentum, but it was managing to dissolve the outer layer of green gas turning a chunk of it into white glowing gas like the rest flooding its body.

The two thirds of the remaining tic tac projectile hit the nerve cord in the dead middle, it deposited its payload. In a microscopically massive slap of force, a crater twenty nerve cells deep was carved into the eight millimeter across cord. The slap managed to mangle a whole tenth of the cord.

The ant which was working on walking towards Mitch in a hobbling yet intimidating limp with one of its legs broken, froze. It started tilting forwards, and fell on its face, before beginning to twitch three of its six legs madly trying to gain control of its other three legs.

Mitch smiled, his bloody and soot covered form walked towards the ant. With a relaxed raise of his right foot Mitch kicked downwards squarely on the ant’s head. Mitch watched his glutes, calf and quads burn through hundreds of grams of glycogen in a single instant. Usually this is where in a single move, Mitch would not be able to exert any more force, just being around twenty times stronger than a normal human. But as the glycogen ran out, and glucose was not transferred fast enough to fill in the gap; the nerves in his muscles began pulling in the dizzying crystals stored in the surrounding tissue and shunted a stream of that magical dark green gas directly into his musculature. The green gas burnt at a much, much slower rate than the glycogen, by providing thousands of times more energy per gram.

Mitch’s leg began accelerating at mind boggling speeds, breaking the sound barrier multiple times over, with a deafening sonic boom, his carbon heel slammed into the hard carapace of the giant ant. At the first thousandth of a second of impact the ant’s head was whole and healthy, by the hundredth it was a pile of goo. The ant’s brain and fluids burst out the sides and the rigid structure of the ant’s skull acted as a bubble to be popped. By the whole second mark, Mitch found himself flying. Flying straight upwards.

The massive unexpected force of the kick sent Mitch up towards the cave ceiling at nearly a hundred and sixty miles an hour. His back slammed against the rock first, his body folding over one of the protrusions in the ceiling. Mitch’s extra elastic organs jiggled in his cavity.

The bear is trying to crawl its way back up through my throat! Mitch burped, then began falling to the ground. He managed to pull his feet below him within the three second freefall.

I see crystals! Mitch thought, looking at the royally mangled ant corpse infront of him.

I really, really, gotta get going soon. It’s time to stop worrying about hard bits, I’m sure my intestines can handle some slivers. Surely?

Mitch made his way over to the ant, he leaned down and grabbed the end of the nerve cord that was sticking out of the head stump. Holding the bulk of the neck meat with his left hand, Mitch pulled on the nerve cord with his right.

With a satisfying slurp and tear, the nerve started sliding out of the ant. As the thing got to the end of his arm wingspan, Mitch began eating the end of it, like a massive multiple cm across noodle.

Mmmm, this thing is chewy! Tastes like the bear brain but…. Extra chewy, also has an acidic tinge to it. Must be the venom leaking… that doesn’t matter when I feeeeee-eleleel thhi-iis Ggoogogo-o--oo-o-o-d!

Mitch’s brain was short circuiting from the quantum threads flowing into his brain. He noticed the secondary neural network slowly built in complexity and size as he gained more threads. His mouth was drooling uncontrollably at this point, his body demanded more crystal to build out the larger network. Just a bit of thread demanded so much crystal it ate through one day of Mitch’ buffer with one ant spine. He didn’t notice with the bear since he was already so hopped up on crystal. But this time, going for the central nervous system first, made Mitch realize the dangers of doing so.

Give me that protein shake! Mitch thought before cracking open the top of the ant’s thorax, sheer strength alone. He plunged one arm into the creature's hemolymph sack sticking into the skull and tore a hole wide enough worthy of a king. He began chugging the building yellow fluid, whilst breaking up drags with chunks of organ meat. Once the thorax was emptied, Mitch cracked open the abdomen of the ant, sheer grip strength alone, and began digging in, Making sure to avoid the venom sack within.

After a massive, high velocity, superhuman dump & piss in the corner of the cave, Mitch began running down the hall at a brisk forty miles an hour. After his high weaned off he realized those drone blades were getting way too loud.

On the plus side the headache of constantly watching every living creature around him in his periferie was getting less and less significant. Mitch tried focusing on a group of muscular tissue in his bicep to see if he could get a focused view of a whole tissue group and immediately regretted it. It seemed to get exponentially harder to have a perfectly clear view of more and more cell inner workings. It felt like being flashbanged by the sheer amount of information flooding into his brain. The weird magic forcibly decoding all of the hormone, chemical and neural signals going through the tissue group causing even more sensory overload.

Mitch stumbled just a dozen feet into his run. He regained his footing and clarity by forcing himself to unfocus his sixth sense before he had an aneurysm.

Much nicer, Who needs to see individual proteins and molecules anyways? I’m content with not getting a headache from sensing all of the cells around me. No need to see their innerworkings. Probably?

Mitch continued down the cave the bear and ant abomination came through. As he continued running, he saw many offshoots from the cave leading into darkness. The only thing that kept him on the main path without straying was the soft orange light at the end of the tunnel.

Being able to sense through solid stone and soil he managed to spot ants just under his feet and in the walls crawling through a presumably nest. Nearly a dozen ants in two hundred meters.

How big would a car sized ant colony be? Too big. City sized colony most likely.

Mitch was about halfway to finishing his jog to the end of the tunnel. He really wanted to see what that orange light was. Fingers crossed it was a settlement of some sort.

What else makes such orange light but flame?

Mitch’s jog was rudely interrupted as he spotted one of the ants in the walls catching a whiff of him and skittering out of the meter wide hole halfway up the right cave wall.

You know there is one issue with this unfocused sixth sense mode. I can’t see the god damn pheromones the ant is spitting out since I can only see full cells.

Mitch continued jogging evenly, hoping to ignore the bastard, but before he could, the thing screeched like it’s late brethren.

Fuck me!

Mitch spotted one more ant coming through the stone, then one more, another, anoth-, ano-,..... Mitch was surrounded by three dozen ants. It took the bastards less than ten seconds to rush to take care of the intruder.

Well time to see how fast I can really go using those crystals as fuel. I need to get down as low as possible to the ground and kick off like a sprinter. I need to put maximum force into horizontal acceleration, I don’t want to lose my footing by launching myself into the ceiling again.

All of the ants were about a dozen feet away just in the edge of his perception. He could see more coming to get him through the walls.

Mitch got himself into prime sprinting kick off position. He mentally prepared himself. During the last stomp on the ant he merely stopped tensing after seeing the crystals starting the stream in. He wanted an ant left to eat. This time around though…

I bet I'll find some bits on the wall.

He blasted his legs with the intention to move. The neurons sent the highest electrical signal they could.

This may have been a mistake…

His leg immediately caused the air surrounding it to combust into swirling plasma, for the split second it took Mitch’s heel to hit the ground the air felt like pushing through thick honey. As soon as Mitch’s heel hit the stone a gigantic earth shattering shockwave rocked the cave and shuttered through Mitch’s body. The equivalent of one ton of tnt was imparted into the floor with his name on it.

Mitch felt his internal organs instantly liquify as within one step, he managed to break the sound barrier dozens of times over and turn all of the two dozen ants directly infront of him and behind into fine yellow mists and flying chunks. His vision was immediately snuffed out as his eyes were burned out of his black graphene skull, his stiff graphene eyelids snapped shut to stop the superheated plasma from boring a hole into his brain. The sound of his departure never reached his ears. He saw the stone spider crack and cave collapse behind him though his unfocused sixth sense.

Mitch rocketed forwards at blurring speeds, his non-aerodynamic body immediately beginning to slow down against the honey like plasma air. The small vertical vector of his pushoff was still enough to send him bouncing up into the cave ceiling then rebounding back down digging into a large ant’s back. Mitch found himself sliding on charred ant gut chunks and boiling juices at hypersonic speeds. He finished the run to the end of the tunnel in record time. Nearly five hundred meters crossed in a fraction of a second. The semi smooth cave floor gave perfect conditions for him to fly into the massive lit up chamber in the most hot, wet and moist style possible.

You know what if…

Mitch flicked his sixth sense into focused mode on his own right eye socket, he saw his own deflated and charred eye and damaged optic nerve laying limp. He reached up with a right hand and pinched off the end of the nerve and tore out the old deflated eye.

After which he focused on forcing as much of the energy providing green gas into his immune and stem cells for recovery. He tweaked a bunch of the hormones flowing through his body and forced the immune cells to flock to his right eye socket instead of repairing the skin. Within seconds a small millimeter across the meatball was beginning to grow from a bloody noodle that was his optic nerve.

Mitch worked in his mind to regrow one eye at record pace, while mindlessly chewing on who knows what.

Mmm threads, must’ve managed to grab a nerve cord… Oh yeah, I definitely grabbed one, that is a shattered ant head attached to my groin.

Over the next few minutes ants would approach him fearlessly and attempt to take off an arm or leg of his. These encounters were almost not worth mentioning as with single forceful slaps the car sized ants exploded from the heat and shockwaves produced by the gas powered impacts. Each slap creates a thundercrack of sound echoing through the cave system. Sounds Mitch could not hear given his pulped eardrums.

Over the next twenty minutes the ant encounters slowed to a crawl. The lack of ants gave Mitch time to regenerate both of his eyes over the next thirty minutes.

Mitch immediately focused on forcing blinked out yellow ant blood from his new eyes, the disgusting protein goop acting to block his new view. Mitch’s vision began clearing a second later.

Mitch could finally see through the yellow goop. He was looking into a gigantic stone chamber, at least a thousand meters across. It was filled with orange foliage and mosses lining the walls. Lining the ceiling were massive orange glowing crystals which had edges that fizzed in and out of reality. The cavern smelled like corpses and mildew and was absolutely swarming with ants. At least five thousand of the buggers. At their center was an ant standing as tall as a ten story building.

Do I see my next meal?! Mitch began drooling, not really thinking of the thousands of ants staring at him, while he was covered in their brethren.

Why am I actually drooling? I just ate? Wait… Mitch scanned himself over with his sixth sense. Liquified kidney, liver, adrenaline glands, Lightly damaged occipital lobes, and liquified saliva glands.

Are those crystals fuzzy because they’re huge versions of the hologram crystals I've been eating… or do I just have that much brain damage?

You know there’s not much room for a running start. I’ll need to backup a bit and accelerate slower to avoid further brain damage. Mitch mused before his thought process was rudely cut off by a loud screech.

The closest ant had screeched, then the second followed, and the third…. And then the entire cave was a cacophony of high pitched noise.

A tidal wave of purple carapace and snapping mandibles surged in his direction.