It was true my Power still often horrified me. Whether it was waking up each morning with subtle shifts in my biology or the constant sensation of being able to feel my blood crawling through its veins. Or, the whisper of my own cells like a schizophrenic paranoia, telling me to eat anyone with a limp, staggered behind the herd. Despite all of this, there was yet a list I was keeping of the handy perks I came across.

Recently added to that list was Spanish. Specifically, the amazing neuro-plasticity needed to learn a language after just a few days of hearing it. Not that I got much use out of my newfound bilingual abilities besides eavesdropping. People were not exactly warm to me on my journeys. I didn't want to risk giving them a heart attack, either.

Since I could not avoid being taken for a Super by impersonating a human, I had gone for the next best thing on the list. It would keep Seraph from knowing I was alive, but it certainly didn't keep them from coming after me. Impersonating a Kizmet was a dangerous game.

Though they first originated in Asia, it was well known that Kizmets were common in South America. They poured out from the Amazon Jungle like plague rats. Therefore I was not too out of place, appearing as a monster.

If I was ever sighted the city would go on lockdown and send out its hunters. But as long as I moved on quickly and caused no damage, the alerts would be dismissed and the heavy hitters never showed. Whether a false alarm or simply a threat that moved on, they didn't care.

What appeared as a baby-snatching creature of the night was not such a high priority in our world. Call us, I imagined them saying, when a real Kizmet shows up. One that can level cities. Honestly, I had no interest in such things. I wanted to create, not destroy.

Though it kept me moving, my goal of creating something of my self and unleashing my Power's potential did not come without difficulty.

When I awoke from a particularly deep sleep, I would enter a fugue state. I would see the hundreds of appendages, squirming and writhing in the dark; I would see the world split into incomprehensible fractals through too many eyes. I would feel my torso contort unhumanly. My eyes would perceive colors I had not in my old life known to exist. I would hear every spider take its steps and the earth teem with worms. At that moment, I would usually scream until I remembered...

This was me now. I slept in the forests by day and moved towards the wall by night. I made no camp and shunned myself from human comforts. Occasionally I would speak from the shadows and scare a child into giving me their sugary snack in a weak moment. But mostly, I stuck to watching and listening at a distance.

As I had traveled, I encountered wild animals. I wrestled a thirteen-foot alligator at one point, nearly going back to square one in the process, being rent into pieces by its jaws. But over the last month of walking, my body had hardly stayed as the protohuman I attempted to be. In the end, I had gouged out its eyes to win. With my current body, I wouldn't even need to bother with such clever tactics.

Without mental blockage, the evolution of my form had gone wild. I was approaching now, at least for my size, something akin to the full extent of my current Power.

I was a mixture of tendrils and chitinous appendages. Eyes flowed like ruddy spots across my hide, with random patches of black, thick fur. Though no bigger than a small car, I had kept myself from accruing any more mass to stay hidden. It was undesirable, but I kept myself fast, quiet, and full of utility rather than pure strength. Every type of venom and acid brewed in the vesicles of my flesh.

The last of my human resemblance was gone. What had once flowered in the ocean's abyss had taken to land. The thing which survives by any means, that was my name. Creep.

I stayed close to the cities on my travels, but not too close. I was, as a matter of fact, often bored as hell. My primary instincts to hunt could not possibly be satisfied anymore, with how far I'd come. By thermal vision, perfect hearing and smell, and now the ability to distribute my weight for near silence across so many limbs... it wasn't a challenge.

So, as I came out of the wasteland and into the Favela, sneaking softly over the rooftops, I stopped to watch a movie. Someone had left an old cowboy marathon playing, and with the subtitles on to boot.

My many eyes could both watch this movie and stare longingly at the border. I was yet in America's annexed territory, on the northern side of the border. Controlled lands.

Huge guns lined the wall, with an open expanse of a Killzone for them to survey just beyond. The burned forest went on for miles, with mines and cameras and guns at every turn. It was the perfect, giant hurt-box for anyone or anything stupid enough to brave it.

A hurt-box that I was not quite ready to subject myself to, for that matter. Flying would have been a nice option, but my Power simply refused the idea. At least at this size, it was logistically impossible. And I was willing to go no smaller, for risk of a run-in with someone Powered.

Staying light enough that the roofs did not collapse beneath me, but heavy enough to body-slam or over-power anyone in my way, that was how I liked it. So, I would have to find another route via land into the mysterious jungle. But for now, it could wait.

I needed to scope out the city. Gain intel, if I was to figure a way across the border. There could be no doubt that the Crystal smugglers had routes, but that knowledge alone was not enough to get me access to them. 

At current, my plan was to make it into the most Kizmet infested jungle in the world and then see what happened. At least this way I would have something to hunt so that I could keep growing. I hoped that with years of practice, my Power would reveal its true limit.

The people who walked by the light of the streetlamps never really bothered to look up and this worked perfectly in my favor. As I peered down at them, crawling softly above where my feet could find purchase, I laughed to myself. They went on, blissfully unaware.

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One person, in particular, caught my eye. His bald head bore the mark of the six kings. He was an older man, grizzled but in amazing shape. I decided to follow him and see what this gang member was up to at this hour. No doubt he was not merely some amateur body-builder on his way home from the gym. He was a Crystal user and a regular one at that.

He was heading for a building entrance down the alley. Not wanting to lose him, I sent a single tendril down to brush his arm. Despite his violent turn and the quick withdraw of his knife, he did not catch me grabbing his scent. Nobody ever looked up, so nor did he see me as he frantically searched around.

I could hear his heart racing.

Deciding that it must have simply been the wind or a really big mosquito, the man kept on his way, picking up the pace.

I watched him enter the building, looking both ways before slipping in through the back-alley door. My thermal sight could perceive much through the walls, but he was quickly lost in the crowd.

Judging by the movements and positioning of people inside, it was a type of seedy bar. I climbed over to see if I could get a better view inside from directly above.

The roof was rotten and squishy, but I watched my step carefully. Seeing a door with access to the roof, I pulled it ajar and took a closer listen.

Besides the usual sounds of chatter and laughter, there seemed to be fighting and yelling in the distance. No one was alarmed, yet I thought the patrons of the bar should have been able to hear it, coming from beneath their feet. Perhaps, I reasoned, they simply didn't care.

The fighting was sustained with only short breaks before it started up again. Each blow was incredibly weighty, sometimes shaking the building. I moved my head closer to see if I could smell the bald man. I wanted to know if he was still in the building.

While trying to focus on my olfactory sense, I didn't catch the subtle crackling noise flaring up around me. When it finally became loud enough to break my concentration, it was already too late. The roof gave out a terrible moan, boards crunching beneath me.

The floor opened beneath me like a trap door, swallowing my body into the building. Though my many arms shot out lightning fast to catch the fall, they could only delay the inevitable. The time it took for me to fully slip was just enough, however, for the few drunkards to get clear. Right before I came crashing down. And then... through the next level of flooring, straight to the ground.

I must have been fatter than I thought. 

Coming to rest on an uncovered dirt floor, I looked around in confusion. The sight of dozens of sweaty, shirtless gang members went around me, with piles of money and Crystal stacked up everywhere.

The scents of blood and stress pheromones filled the air. Coupled with what I'd heard, I took myself to be lying right in the middle of the fighting pit.

All of us remained in stunned silence. I refused to speak, lest I blow my cover as a Kizmet and let on to the idea that someone with my Power was in the city. That, and my voice had adapted to sound as nightmarish as possible, which couldn't possibly help the situation.

Guns were drawn and fists were raised. Knives folded out. I could see no easy exit out of this place and the tension grew thick. My jump was good, but not twenty-foot-vertical good, for the hole I'd left above. Perfectly encircled, I had no other option.

I had to go through them to escape. The last time I had fought a crowd of Super Brawlers, they had crushed my head to bits and rendered me utterly helpless. This time, I couldn't allow that to happen.

As soon as I took my first steps, all hell broke loose. The first fighter leaped towards me and I jutted out an appendage to knock him aside. Only, he grabbed ahold of the tendril and then tore it apart with his bare hands. He made it look easy.

Bullets bounced off my hide, causing them to rapidly abandon their guns in favor of grabbing knives and jumping in. Eyes were going offline across my surface at a worrying speed, as they all rushed in and started punching and slashing randomly. Each fist felt worse than a bullet, tearing through into the flesh where it happened to get around my armor.

I couldn't hold back with these people any longer. I couldn't be afraid of the damage I'd cause. They were amped on Crystal and if I let them, they would tear me to shreds.

My main forelimbs punched out from where they had been hidden in my mass. Armored and ending in pincers, they quickly batted the men aside like bowling pins, striking with the weight and speed of an oncoming train. One of my punches even broke iron bones, eliciting a shocked scream.

They didn't think they could be hurt.

Making slow progress out of the fighters pit, I attacked humans for the first time in my life with reckless abandon. Those that had managed to get onto my back found the shell there completely impenetrable. I didn't bother trying to hurt them, only throwing them off. My goal was not to win, it was to run.

Suddenly, three of them banded together in taking hold of one of my main legs. They pulled at its hard surface, dragging me back towards the pit. That was until another two figured the same idea on the opposite side.

Altogether, they prepared to rip off my legs like you would a spider.

Seeing no other choice, I let my weight hit the ground while I reared back with the remaining legs I had on either side. Then, driving their pointed end down, I stabbed each of them in the thigh.

Blood gushed free and four more fighters stumbled back out of the fight in pain.

Injured but still mobile, I plowed through the remaining men standing between me and the exterior wall. Compared to the immovable Crystal Gang members, the wall fell like it had been made of paper.

Though some tried to keep pursuit and got up to scary speeds in doing so, none could match me at my full gallop. In seconds I had crawled from the ground level and onto the roofs, straight up the walls without slowing down or looking back. Then, I disappeared into the night.

Twelve percent of my mass had been lost to repairs, the cells reported. As I perched, catching my breath on an old church building nearby, the bells went off signaling the end of the hour. Eyes returned to show me the cloudy city in full, with gang members shouting and the beginnings of police sirens in the distance. A plume of dust faded into the clouds from where the building had sustained structural damage.

Hopefully, the gang would be uncooperative and no word would get out from the police to the Kizmet hunters. That was a safe bet. I didn't want to be rushed in crossing the border.

Just my damn luck that in this of all cities I had made such a glaring mistake. The one city I couldn't simply run away from, without going backward. And I would never go backward.

Yet, it hadn't all been for nothing, apparently.

One of my tentacles had wrapped closely to my body to keep safe. Curled in its grasp, I saw, was a single blue stone. The rock barely glowed, but it tingled against my bare, leathery skin.

So much fuss over such a little thing, I thought. In the hands of the Unpowered, it was a taste of the one percent. It gave them durability, strength, speed. The basic set of a class three brawler at max dose. But in the hands of one already Powered? That was a different story entirely.

Back in Pensacola, Fortitude had been taking regular old amphetamines. They were given out freely, partly to keep the Heroes from feeling tempted to the enemy's substance. To be caught with the Crystal was treason in America. Punishable, like most crimes specific to Supers, by a life sentence.

Staring down at the little twinkling star in my appendage, I was overcome with curiosity. A tinge of malevolence, too, for the breaking of rules. It would show me what would otherwise take years of practice to develop. What I wanted most in the world. My potential.

Slowly, I put the Crystal into my maw, more than eager to play with fire.