People. There were people. For the first time since I had woken up in those god-forsaken caverns, in that god-forsaken, horrific flesh blob of a body, there were people nearby. I wasn’t about to come out and reveal myself to them with all of my tentacles and mouths and millipede-like eyes, of course, but I at least wanted to see them; I felt some kind of primal need to just lay eyes on another human being in the midst of everything that I was going through. That being said, if they did have labcoats on, then maybe I would show them all of my tentacles and mouths and millipede-like eyes.

I had generally learned well enough how to move around in my new body, but I hadn’t yet really tried to do so stealthily; it would be a bit of a trial by fire, but I figured that trying to sneak up on people for the first time as a flesh blob was a good enough time as any to learn how to do so. And thus I slowly, cautiously, and deliberately sent one limb forward, grasped onto the ground by growing out some suckers, and took the time to drag myself along the ground as delicately as I could; though my body seemed to make some small amount of noise as it pressed against the cavern floor, my body seemed soft enough that it didn’t produce enough noise in the process to alert the people up ahead.

After minutes of agonizingly slow movement, I was eventually able to reach a point where the voices were just around the corner. As I sat there listening to their unfortunately incomprehensible conversation - I couldn’t even figure out what language they were speaking - I tried to figure out the best way to get eyes on them without being spotted myself. As I considered all of the animals that I had eaten up to that point and the various ways that they moved, navigated, and hid away, my thoughts eventually settled on the humble snail, and their stalked eyes. Maybe they couldn’t exactly look around corners, but the principle of it inspired what I considered to be the best idea that I had come up with since entering my new body: I could grow an eye on the end of my tentacle, and then have that and only that look around the corner while my larger, more easily seen core remained out of sight.

It was easy enough to do so since I had grown enough eyes by that point to make it second nature, as opposed to the indistinguishably long period of extreme focus that I needed the first time that I had made them. It was, admittedly, extremely odd to have vision that I could move around willy nilly in three dimensions, and I had to take a few moments to get used to it before I could proceed with my plan. Eventually, though, I was able to curve my eye-tipped limb around the corner and finally get a look at the people that I so desperately wanted to see.

Unfortunately - much like everything else that I had tried to look at with my millipede eyes - I had a pretty poor image of the two individuals standing there. The compound, monochrome arthropod eyes that I had grown were more meant to detect motion than make out any meaningful details, and that fact was only exacerbated by the fact that the visual organ was mostly vestigial given how generally useless sight was down in the deep, dark caves. If nothing else, though, I could tell that they were people: two arms, two legs, and a body with a head on top. They were also quite larger than I was in that moment; if I had to estimate I supposed that they were a standard six-ish feet in height, while I was about three feet in diameter - not that I had ever considered the idea that I might have ever needed to measure myself in diameter rather than in height.

There wasn’t much that I could make out besides their general shape, though. I couldn’t see if they were holding anything, what their faces looked like, or even what kind of clothes they were wearing; if nothing else it seemed that they didn’t have any labcoats on, and so I closed up all of the mouths that I had grown in advance for such a possibility. One peculiar thing that I did notice, though, was the fact that neither of them seemed to possess any light source… And yet still seemed to be able to see perfectly in the pitch blackness of the cavern. Were they some of those mythical troglodytes that I had heard so much about? Or maybe they were abandoned science experiments, just like myself?

I obviously had no idea what they were saying, but I still observed them closely in order to get at least some idea of what they were talking to each other about. Whatever it was, the two of them were extremely animated, gesticulating wildly and flailing their limbs about chaotically. For a few moments I thought that they might have been about to come to blows, but they thankfully didn’t throw any hands while I was watching them. One way or another, though, it was pretty obvious that they were both seriously upset about something, even if I had no idea what it was.

SO MUCH MEAT.

The thought screamed through my head like a fire alarm going off in my brain.

SO MUCH FLESH.

Something like tinnitus rang through the liquids that made up my sense of hearing.

SO MUCH FOOD.

I felt my thoughts begin to swim and distort as I began to lose control of my mind.

EAT. CONSUME. DEVOUR.

Ever since I had woken up, I had hoped that the first verbal noise that I would make in my new body would be some attempt at communication with another human being, but it appeared that my wish was not to be granted. The sound that I made in that moment could only be described as a scream, a scream that ripped itself out of the many throats that had spontaneously grown alongside the many mouths that had grown themselves without my command. My body seemed to even reflexively expand my lungs so that as much air as possible would be pushed through my myriad esophagi to make the violent screech even louder than it would have been otherwise. So loud the noise was that I felt the vibrations it caused in the air through the worm-like fluids that allowed me to hear, and to some degree I could even feel it shaking the ground beneath me. It was nothing like any scream that I had ever made before as a human, nor was it like any scream that I had ever heard, either. It was primal. It was bestial. It was monstrous.

In spite of my hysteria, the tentacle eye-stalk that I had grown remained in place and continued to observe the two individuals I had been spying on. That tentacle eye-stalk watched the people stop, turn towards where I was hiding behind the corner, look at my curving limb for a moment, before turning and running away. I really, truly wish that they had not run away. I had always heard that there were plenty of predator animals that you could encounter in the wild where you should absolutely, positively not run away from them, since all that did was cause some kind of hunting instinct to kick in that only encouraged them to chase and kill you; I just had never expected that I would be the creature whose hunting instinct overtook them after something ran away from me.

I tried to stop myself. I put every single last tiny, minute ounce of willpower that I had possessed in trying to stop myself. I need you to understand this. Genuinely, I need you to understand this. Please, please understand that I really, truly did try to stop myself. But I was not in control of my body at that moment; whatever it was that I had become was in control of my body at that moment. I tried to force my tentacles to hold themselves back, to not hold down onto the ground, to not flex themselves , to not throw my horrendous, teeth-filled, eye-pocked body full force towards the fleeing animals.

But I failed.

I flew through the air in a way that I didn’t think that I could, that I certainly hadn’t tried myself up until that point. I was moving fast. I felt the air flow over my meaty flesh as my tentacles reflexively pulled themselves in against my body to make it more aerodynamic. I saw my field of vision quickly closing in on the back of my prey. I watched as my limbs reached out as far as they could, seeking to catch the creature that my body was hunting. That I was hunting.

I tried again to keep my tentacles back. I tried again to keep them from grabbing onto the person. I tried to force them to let go once they had latched onto the creature. I tried to stop myself from tackling them to the ground. I failed, of course. I watched their partner flee into the darkness, not that I could blame them for doing so.l

I had never really managed to get a good gauge on exactly how strong my abomination of a body was, since all that I had been catching up until that point were animals far smaller and far weaker than I was, little bugs and little salamanders that were likely already prey for other larger things in their environment. As the human I had caught struggled underneath me, though, I realized that I was terrifyingly strong, definitely stronger than my prey, and strong enough that there was no way that they were going to escape my grasp. They did manage to roll onto their back, but I suspected that they regretted it the moment that they saw my countless limbs wrapping around them, my countless eyes watching them, and my countless mouths with countless teeth getting ready to bite into them. Saliva and even stomach acid dripped down onto them as I slavered like an animal, and I felt fully aware of just how much that overwhelming, all-consuming, horrific hunger was in control of everything that I was doing.

With how poor my eyes were, I couldn’t exactly tell too much about the expression that they were wearing on their face in that moment. Even so, I instinctively knew exactly what I was looking down at: I was looking down at a human being, just like myself, terrified at the thought that I was about to kill them and eat them - which I probably was, admittedly. My future meal screamed hysterically as they attempted to grab onto my tentacles and unwrap my limbs from their body, as they attempted to grab onto one of my jaws and keep it from biting down on them, and as they attempted to bring their legs in to try and kick me off of them. There was a somber feeling in what was left of my human mind, knowing just how futile their struggles were, knowing that the poor thing was trying to fight off some sort of abominable lab experiment seemingly optimized for the task of hunting and killing. One of my mouths eventually managed to bite down hard onto the person’s arm, my jagged teeth penetrating the flesh like a hot knife through butter. I tasted the warm blood. I tasted the human flesh. I felt my fangs hit the bone and crack it open slightly, the taste of marrow reaching my tongue as well.

And all of it was delicious.

I heard the rock whizzing through the air before it hit me, but I was tangled up enough with my prey that I couldn’t dodge out of the way of it in time, even with my monstrous quick reflexes. My eyes looked around for whatever had thrown the stone, and I saw the second person from before, apparently having returned to try and save their companion. They were panting, that much I could tell, and I barely made out a grunt as they threw another rock my way. I was tied up enough with the person beneath me that I wasn’t able to move out of its trajectory, but I let out another horrifying scream like the one from before at my aggressor. There was no way that the makeshift weapons would ever truly harm me, but it was at least distracting me from continuing to devour the creature I had captured. A third projectile struck me, that time directly in the eye.

When the first two stones had hit me, I felt the ravenous beast’s control begin to slip, but as soon as the third one slammed into one of my sensitive optical organs, I found it recoiling enough that I was able to wrest back control over my body. I quickly withdrew my tentacles from around the human being that I had turned into my prey, before jumping back several feet away from them. I watched as their companion ran up to them and began helping them to their feet while the both of them stared at me in fear, obviously expecting me to once again rush at them to try and finish the job that I had started. I myself focused on the first person as they nursed their injured arm - the arm that I had injured, the arm that I had tried to eat - before the two of them turned around and began running away deeper into the caves.

I didn’t know if I could do it. I didn’t even know if that body was capable. Given that I didn’t have any practice with it, and given that I hadn’t even created the right body parts to do so… Hell, they probably didn’t even speak the language that I did, definitely didn’t speak the same language as I did. But I had to try. I had to try to apologize for the atrocious act that I had just committed upon them. I had to try to apologize for the fact that I had just attacked them and tried to devour one of them like they were nothing more than an animal. I opened one of my mouths, shifted my lungs to try and get the proper amount of air, and tried my best:

“Ayhngh scharee.”

It was pathetic. It was atrocious. Just as everything else about me, just as everything else that I tried to do, it was monstrous. I had no doubt that it came off as nothing more than another primordial yawp of some kind, a warning for them to never come back into my territory.

I waited until they were out of sight, before slinking off somewhere else.

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

I sat there next to an underground river, snatching up blind cave fish as they swam by and devouring them with the same gusto as I had been devouring everything else, with the same gusto that I had nearly devoured a fellow human being with. Admittedly, the “fellow” part of that statement was beginning to ring increasingly hollow with every time that I thought back onto what I had done to that poor person. And I was thinking about that quite a lot.

I myself wasn’t exactly in the mood to eat anything, not after I had just nearly killed a person, not after what I had just tried to eat. Unfortunately, my body’s never-ending hunger was still as present as always, still demanding as much food as I could shovel into it. Rather than risking that horrendous appetite from taking control and trying to track down and hunt those people once more, I decided that it would be better to just give it what it wanted, regardless of what I myself wanted in that moment.

At least fish were cold-blooded.

The memory of what it was like to taste warm, human blood still replayed itself over and over again in my head, the memory of how delectable and exquisite its tangy, metallic taste was on my tongue; the memory of the taste of human flesh alongside the memory of the faintest hint of human bone marrow that had been promised to me followed alongside the taste of human blood, and I simply could not block it out no matter how hard it tried. There was simply no denying it: humans tasted good to me in that body. It was a horrifying thought, but I tried to cope with it by telling myself that it wasn’t me that enjoyed the taste of human meat, but rather my body and the beast that lived inside of it. It wasn’t me that had nearly devoured a person, it was my body. I had to hold onto that logic, as faulty and as self-serving as it may have been, if I wanted to get past the fact that the first thing that I had done when I finally saw another human being was to try to tear them apart and eat them.

Another human being? Was I even still a human being? It was without a doubt a question that had more facets that I could conceive of in that moment. Physiologically speaking, I obviously wasn’t; I was some kind of freakish, horrendous, flesh-blob monster that had no desire except to eat and consume and ingest. Psychologically, I still felt like a human; I had completely lost control there, certainly, but I was still a sapient being, I was still thinking human thoughts, and I was still feeling human emotions, even to the point that I had made a pathetic attempt to apologize to the people that I had hurt. Philosophically speaking? That was the real question there. I wasn’t sure if the Ship of Theseus problem applied to my situation, but I figured that something like it must have.

I felt guilty, obviously. I wasn’t exactly the type of person who enjoyed hurting other people. There was shame, as well; shame over the fact that I had lost control, that I had been too weak to retain control, that I had been too weak to keep the beast at bay, and that what I had done to those people was the fault of how weak I had been. My more rational mind knew that there had been no way that I ever could have held the beast back, not when it was the first time that it had ever tried to take control, not when I had never had any practice at trying to restrain it, and not when it had woken up with such ravenous furor out of nowhere. More than anything else, though, I was horrified; I was horrified that I had come to inhabit a body where I had to worry about those sort of things, horrified that I had felt my humanity begin to buckle against the pressure of that constant, overwhelming hunger, and - above all else - horrified at the fact that I had just tried to eat another person.

I felt the bones of the cave fish crack and crumble underneath my teeth, and I felt its internal organs squish and tear as I ripped the entire thing apart in a single moment. The gore and viscera didn’t just simply slide down my throat, but was pulled along by countless, tiny tentacles that dragged it down into one of my many stomachs. My stomach acid digested it in equally record time as my mouth had torn it apart, and every single last little bit of the cave fish was stored in my body for later use, either as calories for the ridiculous amount of energy that it took to power my absurdly powerful muscles, or as raw material for growing new parts.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

And yet, I was still hungry. There was some part of me that knew that no matter how many of those fish I ate, no matter how many millipedes, salamanders, spiders, and snails I ate, that I would still be hungry after all of it. There was some part of me that knew that I could eat every single last living thing in those caverns, that I could completely consume the entire ecosystem, that I could totally wipe out every single last sign of life, and I would still be hungry after all of it. I felt less like a person and more like a thing that existed only to devour everything around me and to use those resources to grow without end.

Sort of like cancer, actually. If there was supposed to be some kind of joke in that, I wasn’t laughing.

That comparison only added to my motivation to not give up. Sure, I could have simply lied down where I was and wait until I eventually starved to death - given how fast my new body’s metabolism seemed to be, I assumed that it wouldn’t have taken too long to do so - but I doubted that the beast would remain quiet if I went without eating for long enough, and I didn’t want to let it take control that it might hunt down and devour more people. More than just that, though, I wanted my old body back. Maybe it was a cancer-filled mess that was ready to die at any given moment, but it was my cancer-filled mess, and it was my death that could have come at any given moment; I wanted to die in my body, and not live in the body of a monstrous flesh blob lab experiment.

Still, if I wanted to die peacefully once I had my old body back, then I had to keep myself under control; I had to keep myself from doing anything as unforgivable as I had already done, and I had to keep myself from doing anything even more unforgivable than what I had already done. Part of me figured that I could practice keeping the beast under control - no matter what, I wanted to try to do that just to prove that I could - but another part of me figured that it would just be safer to try and avoid human contact as much as I could… Unless they were the labcoat bastards that I was trying to track down. If I had to get close to determine whether or not they were indeed the labcoat bastards, then I would only get as close to them as I needed to, and then immediately fall back - or launch out at them if they were indeed wearing labcoats. I didn’t trust myself to be strong enough to keep the beast on a leash if I got too close to another human being again, but all that meant was that I had to exercise the proper amount of due caution.

Regardless, I still had to do whatever I had to do in order to get my old body back, and the first thing that came to mind was finding more creatures down in these caves, eating them, and trying to adapt whatever body parts they might have had into my own form; looking for bats was on the top of my priority list, since I could only imagine what having wings would do for me. Thankfully, I had already consumed a wide variety of subterranean creatures by that point, and so it would be simple enough to grow their various sensory organs, albeit also extremely time consuming.

Honestly, it had been difficult for me to keep track of time down there. I had heard stories of people trapped in caves who completely lost any sense of time due to the lack of sunlight, and that was admittedly only one of my many problems. Whatever internal clock that I might have had as a human seemed to be absent in my monstrous biology, and I lacked even the need for sleep that might indicate the passing of circadian rhythm cycles. Indeed, the only bodily need I ever felt was that omnipresent hunger, which was only ever temporarily quieted whenever I ate anything; if my hunger had actually waxed and waned, then I might have been able to at least use that to get an estimation of the passage of time. I didn’t even have using the bathroom as a way to track time, since it seemed like my body put absolutely nothing that I ate to waste; admittedly, I didn’t too much mind the fact that I didn’t have to try and use the bathroom in that body, and I didn’t even want to think about what that might have been like.

Focusing on growing new body parts was definitely the point at which I most lost track of time, though. I found myself so consumed and focused on stitching together every single last cell of any new addition to my physiology that I became unaware of all else - though some unconscious part of me seemed to at least be keeping an eye out for oncoming threats - and even my never-ending appetite seemed to fade away in the midst of all of it. Either way, new and better senses would be a critical part in finding the scientists responsible for turning me into what I had become, and so I was ready to devote as much time as I needed to gaining them.

The blind cave fish that I had been dining on for the past while were obviously no good in the vision department, but it did seem to have some hearing organs worth a shot; as usual, the auditory receptors of the fish were utterly unlike what I had possessed as a human, but having spent a while with millipede eyes and worm “hearing”, my mind had begun to adapt to senses foreign to those I had once possessed. From what I could tell, the cave fish “heard” through a line of openings on its side, which seemed great for detecting motion, vibrations, and even pressure changes… But only underwater. Given that the underground rivers had a very strict path that they seemed to follow and likely wouldn’t lead me anywhere meaningful, I didn’t keep the cave fish’s sensory organs as part of my body; I did store them away for quick growth later if I ever needed to get into the water for some reason, though.

The cave salamanders didn’t seem to give much in the way of sight, either. I didn’t have too much luck with vision from the insects, as well… Or the spiders… Or the worms… Or the snails… As it turned out, most animals that lived deep in caves weren’t big on the whole “eyes” thing, given how their homes tended to be pitch black. Some of the things that I had eaten had primitive or vestigial eyes, which gave me the same, vague sense of vision that the millipede eyes had. Each species did seem to have eyes adapted for a different purpose, though the common denominator was always that the sight I gained from them was far worse than I had hoped for.

At one point, I tried putting a bunch of different eyes from a bunch of different animals on my body all at once, hoping that the variety of vision types could help at least slightly cover for the weaknesses of the others. Unfortunately, I quickly found myself overwhelmed. There were, indeed, quite a lot of different vision types; too many different vision types, actually. The salamanders saw the world in a different way than the spiders, which saw the world in a different way from the snails, which saw the world in a different way from the millipedes, and my puny brain simply couldn’t handle trying to see the world in so many different ways at once. Well, whatever counted for a nervous system in my body actually seemed more than capable of handling the optical signals from a bunch of different eyes at once, but my consciousness - so used to seeing the world in only one way - was flooded with so much information that I simply couldn’t handle it. In the end, I settled on spider eyes, which at least seemed to have the best vision in terms of motion tracking.

As one might expect, the auditory sense of troglobites ended up being much better than their visual sense. Most of the hearing methods were roughly the same across species: either they had sensitive hairs somewhere on or in their body that picked up vibrations in the air and transmitted that as sound, or they had openings that led downwards towards bones that did roughly the same thing. Given that each type of animal seemed to hear across different frequencies compared to one another - some were able to pick up extremely high-frequency noises, while others were able to pick up extremely low-frequency ones - I yet again tried to adapt several different hearing organs at once, only to find myself just as overwhelmed as I had been with trying to adapt several different visual organs at once. After a lot of trial and error and experiments, I ended up settling on placing sensitive hairs all over my body, just like the spiders tended to do.

It was, I had to admit, a little bit worrying that I found myself picking up so many spider adaptations. I wasn’t exactly arachnophobic, but I still didn’t like the idea of turning from a monstrous flesh blob freak into an eight-legged freak instead.

The sense of smell that I managed to pick up from some of my meals was surprisingly in-depth, with the salamanders and the snails seeming to have had the best olfactory organs. At first I wasn’t quite sure what use scent would have had down in a cold, dark cavern, but as soon as I connected the nerves between my new “nose” and my brain, I instantly realized how critical it was for them. I quickly found myself able to distinguish smells on a much deeper level, differentiating between a dozen different scents even as they all hit my nostrils at once; more intriguingly, I even seemed to be able to precisely detect what direction smells were coming from, something that was no doubt helped by placing a bunch of “noses” all around my body. Even more than the hearing that I had adapted, I felt like my new olfactory senses would be critical in finding and tracking down the labcoat bastards… Though I did admittedly worry what effect smelling any human - labcoats or no -might have had on the beast.

Before I could even get around to trying to find the scientists, though, I ended up having a rather peculiar encounter with a fellow cave dweller. It was yet another arachnid - though this one was a scorpion rather than a spider - and it was… Big, at least as big as my flesh blob body. Its body seemed to be about three feet in length, a stinger around the same size, with pincers that were similarly massive. It was, without a doubt, the single largest scorpion that I had ever seen in my entire life, either in my old body or in my new body. Honestly, I didn’t know that scorpions could even get that big; more than anything else, it reminded me of those huge, radioactively mutant scorpions from some video games that I had played once.

Most of the things that I had hunted up until that point were far too small to have any real way of defending itself against me - barring the humans, of course. I was larger than them, had a virtually unlimited amount of quick, powerful tentacles that could catch them and throw them into a virtually unlimited amount of massive mouths that had a virtually unlimited amount of teeth that were obviously powerful enough to bite even through bone. Some of my more venomous prey tried to sting and bite at me, but whatever poison they had that might have worked on other creatures seemed to be a complete no-sell against the apex predator form that I had come to inhabit.

However, what I was looking at in that moment through nearly-blind eyes was no doubt also an apex predator in those caverns. More than likely, it could and did eat all of the same things that I did, with just as little concern and just as little care as I did. It was unlikely that it suffered from the same, excruciating hunger that I did, admittedly - how much did scorpions have to eat, anyways? but I imagined that it still did pretty good for itself. I wanted to consume it not just because of how big and meaty and juicy and delicious and tempting it looked to my appetite-addled brain, but also because of what I might be able to adapt from it, senses or otherwise.

Yeah. That was why I wanted to eat it. Not at all because the beast was frothing at the mouth over how much flesh there was to devour.

Unfortunately, all that my body had in terms of weapons at that point were the aforementioned tentacles and teeth. I had consumed enough poisonous animals that I was fairly certain that I could grow venom-producing and venom-administering body parts if I needed to… But I was also fairly certain that they would be just as ineffective against a scorpion as they had been against me; I certainly may have been wrong about that, but I didn’t want to take the risk of sacrificing time and energy to make venomous fangs just for them to be useless against my foe. Beyond potential poisons, though, nothing that I had eaten seemed to possess anything that I could adapt to help me offensively.

Thankfully, I did have something that I could adapt to help me defensively: the shells of the snails that I had been chowing down on. I had thankfully taken the time to create a prototype shell earlier while I was experimenting with all of the different sensory organs, having done so exactly for coming up against a creature like the scorpion that could pose a legitimate threat to me. I didn’t exactly understand how the snails actually formed their shells - in spite of all of the nature television that I had watched in the hospice house, I was nothing close to an actual biologist - but it was easy enough to understand that my body was sending all of the calcium from all of the bones that I had devoured onto the surface of my “skin”, where it hardened into a protective layer that should - hopefully - give me some degree of safety against the scorpion’s stingers and pincers.

With the prototype already developed, it was easy enough for my body to quickly form the shell and get ready for combat right away. I watched and listened - more of the listening, honestly, with how bad my eyes were - as the scorpion scuttled around looking for its own prey; soon enough, its stinger whipped out lightning-fast to hit a salamander that was somewhat larger than what was average in the caves. The poor creature almost immediately went into convulsions, and my worries that even my toxin-resistant body might not be able to handle whatever the scorpion was packing resurfaced. The giant arachnid went over to its paralyzed prey and began eating it, apparently while it was still alive - not a fate that I envied, to say the least, even though the beast screamed at me to claim the meal for my own.

If there was ever a time to strike, though, it was when the scorpion was preoccupied with its meal. Grasping tightly at the walls with the suckers on my tentacles, I threw myself at the arachnid with just as much speed as I had thrown myself at the human before - albeit with significantly more control over my body than back then. The scorpion must have had just as good hearing as the spiders I had picked up adaptations from, though, as it whirled around while I was still in mid-air to try and catch me with its pincer. Shooting a tentacle up towards the ceiling, I managed to swing myself up at the last moment before its pincer hit me head on; the snail shell proved its worth in that moment, though, as it deflected what of the blow managed to glance against the side of my body, presumably keeping me from suffering a modest injury.

Either way, there was still a scorpion to kill. As I reached the roof of the cavern, a few feet above my enemy - but not at all out of range of its stinger - I clung onto the ceiling with several tentacles while I sent a larger one down to try and catch its pincer at the wrist before my opponent withdrew it. I managed to wrap my limb around what I had aimed for, squeeze down, and begin pulling at it… But I found far more resistance than I had expected, and my attempt at breaking the scorpion’s wrist failed miserably. Certainly, this creature wasn’t one that I could simply catch and kill without a sweat, not at all like all of the other animals that I had preyed upon up until that point.

Once again I tried not to think too much about the humans that I had preyed upon.

Once I realized that I wasn’t going to deal any damage to its pincer, I attempted to withdraw my tentacle, only to see my foe’s other pincer coming in and cutting off that tentacle; I had kept my limbs unarmored, worried that any attempt to cover them in a shell would have limited their mobility, but I was fairly certain that it would have been severed even if I had tried to protect it. Losing that tentacle was actually the first time that I had ever received a serious injury in my new body; sure, one of the humans from before had thrown rocks at me, but having one of my limbs cut off was something else entirely to getting whacked with a few rocks, even if one of them had hit me in the eye. Given that my body was some kind of lab experiment abomination optimized for predation, I was unsurprised that the pain was remarkably easy to handle; at the very least, I doubted that it was anywhere near as much pain as I would have felt if one of my human arms had been cut off. Maybe I had something like adrenaline flooding my cells in that moment and I would feel the agony once the fight was over, or maybe extreme pain was nothing but a burden for a creature that could so easily regrow body parts at a whim; either way, I was thankful that I didn’t have to deal with any painful distress while I was still in the middle of a fight.

After all, I certainly wasn’t going to let a freaking giant bug be the reason that I never got to find the labcoat bastards and get my old body back.. Pivoting to a more cautious approach, I pulled myself out of range of the scorpion, hoping that it would come to me and that I could plan a counter-attack as it advanced; I landed on the ground to find that my enemy was unfortunately already doing so, far faster that I had expected it to. Thankfully, my own reflexes were just as quick, and I was able to react swiftly and dodge the side as it tried to sting down at me. Yanking myself ahead with my tentacles, I once again sent a more offensively-designed limb at my foe; I wrapped it around a joint on its right middle leg, held on tight, and hoped that the force of my forward momentum straining against the joint in the opposite direction that it was meant to bend would cause some damage to it. A sharp cracking noise signaled my success, and I found myself internally celebrating my first victory against it.

Unfortunately, I was so distracted by said victory that I didn’t notice the stinger coming down towards me; it pierced into my flesh several inches deep, and I immediately felt its venom begin to enter my cells. As I had worried, it was far more powerful than the toxins that the cave spiders had been carrying, and it immediately began to spread through my body and interrupt my nervous system’s ability to communicate orders to the poisoned areas. It was obvious that I couldn’t allow the venom to continue to flow through my cells and debilitate yet more of my body, and so I did the only thing that I could think of in that moment: I disconnected the chunk of flesh that had already been flooded with the toxin and let it drop to the floor. I had sacrificed a pretty significant portion of my anatomy - about a half foot or so in diameter - and I wasn’t even sure if I could reclaim it afterwards with how poisoned the flesh was, but it had been a necessary sacrifice in order to ensure that I didn’t become as disabled as the poor salamander had been.

Losing some of my biomass had its advantages, though. Since I was smaller, I found myself more mobile, faster, and harder to hit, though my tentacles still had just as much strength as they had before. Focusing myself up, I threw myself underneath the scorpion, between the cavern floor and its abdomen. I wrapped one limb around its left fore leg, one around its right rear leg, and then held on tight. I wasn’t trying to break them - not in that moment, at least - but was rather trying to keep myself exactly where I was beneath the arachnid even as it scuttled around trying to get me out from under it. Once properly secured onto its limbs, I sent an offensive tentacle to its left middle leg, and yanked backwards on it. There was another snap, and I felt my enemy begin to panic

As the scorpion struggled against me without much success, I pushed the attack and broke its right fore leg and left rear leg, before finally cracking apart the left fore and right rear legs that I had been holding onto for leverage. Tumbling out from beneath my enemy as it collapsed onto the ground without its legs to support it, I quickly dodged out of pincer and stinger distance before taking up a position to observe the scorpion. Even without its legs, it managed to move slightly by rocking its body back and forth, apparently trying to escape now that I had maimed it so much. I didn’t know much about arachnids, but I was pretty sure that there was no coming back from having all of its legs broken. I felt kind of bad about the whole thing, actually, since from the outside it must have looked like I was one of those kids who tore the legs off of ants and stuff like that. The violence was necessary, though, if I wanted to get the adaptations that I would need to continue on my mission.

And if I was to satiate that god-damned hunger of mine. The scorpion definitely wasn’t as large nor as meaty as a cow, but it would have to do.

I watched as the scorpion flailed its pincers and stingers towards me, apparently attempting to fend off any attempts that I might have made to advance upon it once more. In spite of having crippled my foe’s ability to walk, I didn’t want to take the risk of getting clipped or stung again, and so I sat and watched as it tired itself out. Whenever it stopped moving, I would move a little bit closer to it until it began flailing around again, before waiting for it to run out of energy. I repeated the process several times, until I eventually came right up to the scorpion while it sat immobile and helpless. Once I was certain that I wasn’t about to get any more limbs cut apart or any more venom injected into me, I began searching around for an appropriate way to finish it off.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any easily breakable points around its head area - even my own impressive teeth even had a hard time biting through its rather sturdy carapace - and so I settled for pulling off its pincers and stingers. It took some time, it took some leverage against the ground, and it took a whole lot of force from my tentacles, but - with the scorpion unable to resist - I eventually managed to completely remove all of its extremities, leaving it nothing but a body. Yet again the vision of a kid torturing an ant came to mind, but I was thankful to find that the creature seemed to pass away rapidly once all of its extremities had been torn off.

Once it was dead, I began setting about trying to crack its exoskeleton apart so that I could get at the juicy bits inside; I would have liked to eat its outer shell for the sake of whatever materials my body might have been able to use from it, but breaking it into bite sized pieces seemed like a complete fool’s errand, and I disregarded its carapace for the most part. The scorpion’s pincers, legs, and stinger all had a lot of classic muscle meat that was tasty and savory and wonderful to my bestial taste buds, and once I flipped it onto its back and got at its soft underbelly, I began slurping up its insides like a slushy.

Okay. That was a disgusting comparison. I am never making that sort of comparison ever again.

Either way, I managed to get a lot of good nutrients from my prey, and I acquired enough flesh from it to grow even larger than I had before it had cut off and poisoned a bunch of my body. As I thought about that, though, I realized that I hadn’t actually yet gotten around to recovering the tentacles that it had dismembered and the chunk of intoxicated meat that I had sloughed off - not to mention the salamander that awaited me as an additional prize.

I looked around the battlefield for my discarded parts, and found the envenomed meat that I had to abandon after getting hit by the stinger. As I approached it, I could smell the poison in it with my newly heightened olfactory senses, and I became increasingly worried that my initial assumption that I wouldn’t be able to reclaim it was correct. I wrapped the flesh-ball up with one of my tentacles and brought it towards one of my mouths, where I very carefully took a very small bite of some of it. I was pleasantly surprised to find - in spite of the biomass being full of toxins - that I was able to eat it without any negative side effects; I vaguely recalled something from one of those nature shows about how venom actually wasn’t harmful unless it was directly injected via bite or sting, though that was something that I never thought would be important to me.

Once I had finished recycling the poisoned meat, I began looking around for the limb that I had lost. It was easy enough to find… Though unfortunately not for any reason that was pleasant. You see, I found my tentacle more through sound than through sight. That was primarily because it was flopping around like a fish out of water. I knew that there were plenty of animals whose limbs still moved on their own, mostly reflexive motions caused by spontaneously generated neural signals, or something of the sort, and so I assumed - and so I hoped - that was why my tentacle was still active.

I cautiously approached my limb - arguably with more care than I had approached the dismembered scorpion - and reached out one of my own, still-attached limbs to poke at it. As my tentacle touched the cut off one, the cut off one stopped moving; at first, I thought that was a good sign, that maybe a simple touch was enough to get its reflexive flopping to stop. When I moved a little bit closer, though, the tentacle… Shifted, much like how my central body could.

First, it curled up into a ball. Then, it melded all of its flesh together into a sphere, once again just like my central body. After that, it grew out a few small tentacles from its small core, along with a few small mouths with lots of small teeth. Finally, it grew a bunch of fine, spider-like hairs across its surface, followed by a few, spider-like eyes. It looked up at me, it stared at me, and even in spite of my poor vision, I could tell: there was intelligence in those eyes.

Yeah. That probably wasn’t very good.