As soon as the drug was ingested, I felt a strange energy brewing in my stomach. It was like the Crystal acted on its own, breaking apart and disappearing on the inside the very moment it touched stomach acid.

The cells had no idea what to do with it or what was going on. As if by an invisible channel, they simply began to feel the effects, gorged with fuel.

My legs began to shake where I stood upon the church roof. Ripples went through my whole anatomy, signaling the oncoming change. A massive structural shift was starting to compensate for the spike in energy. It destabilized everything.

Desperately, the cells attempted to siphon the oncoming wave into newly formed fat stores. But the calorie conversion could never move fast enough. I'd just consumed bio-compatible uranium, and nothing could turn back the meltdown now.

My limbs went soft, bringing me crashing down onto the roof. It broke instantly, leaving me to a short drop before the attic beams of the church barely stopped my fall. I could see up into the bell tower from where I lay, watching its leftover sway from the chiming of the hour.

I felt sick. Struck with nausea and delirious fatigue.

My appendages had melded along with the rest of my body into an enormous, tumorous growth of fat. The Crystal was lancing through the biology, forming some kind of unbreakable carbon lattice. It created electrically reactive tendrils in the muscles which contracted with incredible force. The entire system it constructed to make me unbreakable and unstoppable was not like anything my cells recognized. This was its standard effect.

Yet, they studied and learned from it. Though the Crystal itself had been impossible to comprehend, more like magic than science, these tiny structures of interlocking carbon nanotubes were material. They solidified with impact but bent softly to the body's whim.

Not only that, but my body had created them. The Crystal had hijacked my cells after binging them with energy and the material to work with out of thin air. That was the magic part. But what came next was a program in execution like my very own mutations. The flesh was controlled to construct its designs by the invisible channel of Power.

Now lit up with lightning, I could see this hidden passage of information. I couldn't locate it anywhere in space, but it flowed nonetheless with thought and consciousness.

Meanwhile, my eyes were being buried in the cancerous flesh. It practically spilled over the hole in the roof to creep down the wall outside like fungus. The structure of the building groaned with this stress.

My problems only got worse when I heard the police sirens go quiet outside. At first, I thought they had given up the hunt, but I quickly realize that it was only the gang members who had scared them off. The shouting only got louder.

Then, it turned to explosions and screaming.

"Let me see!" I demanded. My voice echoed into the cells and down the paths of maddening energy. Immediately, they responded.

Eyes shot out with tendrils forming them. Ten, twenty feet, until they floated out into the air above the church like free strands of spiderweb in the summer wind. They were thin and covered in light-detecting cells, forming a vivid and spectacular picture of the entire city out of their length.

I saw a man floating above the streets launching down bright red beams from his hands. He was attacking gang members on the street where they had set fire to police vehicles and killed cops. Even high on Crystal, the gang members were no match to his constant bombardment.

Someone on the ground level launched a moped with their bare hands, high into the sky where the Hero was forced to dodge. With one counter-attack, his target was horrifically burned and wailing in agony.

This must have been one of the military Heroes stationed to protect the wall, I realized. His strength was impressive and his cold callousness was unmistakable.

With my Power hyped up on Crystal but burning it fast, I had to stay hidden if I wanted to avoid a fight. My stringers were not the best idea for stealth, but my curiosity was overwhelming.

Before I could detach them to float away, however, I worried that I saw the Hero turn his entire body to face the church. He might not have been sure of what he was seeing. My eyes were no more than long glimmers where they caught the light reflecting off the fires.

In a panic, I split off the visual strands and tried to pull myself together. Growth had stopped, luckily, but I was still overburdened with energy. The cells had devised a more efficient store than fat, resorting to the creation of unbelievably elaborate chemical mechanisms. Fueled by their rapid speed of invention and frantic pressure, a brand new evolution was possible.

Likewise, as I attempted to make myself move, my desire shuddered through the flesh and suddenly began a mutation. Fat was broken down at rapid speed and transformed into a newer means of storage. A highly compact form of carbon. A brand new invention of the unique problem I faced.

At last, within the mountain of rotting meat, cells coalesced into a gestating parasite. As if from a gelatinous egg, the creature I had become began to tear itself free.

Hard, black, and ant-like, this design was prepared for speed and the potential heat of a laser. I broke free and skittered into the church attic just as the Hero came to hover and peer down into the hole in the roof. I barely avoided his gaze.

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From the shadows, I saw him gag in revulsion at the sight of my cacoon.

My body vibrated with terrible Power. I felt like I could easily transform again if I wanted. Like I could turn in one swift motion to an amorphous flurry of spines and teeth, launching forward to tear him to shreds...

I could see it in my mind's eye. The cells screamed out at me to strike out and bathe myself in gore and sinew. A gnawing hunger seizing my muscles and promised that if I only acted, I would feel alive and satisfied with blood.

With great effort, I turned away into the dark instead. I didn't want to kill any people with my Power, only animals. I wasn't a murderer, like Maximal.

It was easy for me to transform again whenever I came to a place too small for my current body to fit through. Almost seamlessly, my supercharged Power allowed me to go from a giant insect to a fluid red smear of organic matter, seeping through the walls. Then, I turned back again on the other side.

Once I had made it out of the church and onto the street level, a hilarious thought came over me. It grew to overpower all reason with the sheer excitement it proposed. At no other time might I have this opportunity again. So, I gave in with glee and yelled a new command.

With perfect control over my Power, the cells obliged, restructuring me at once into the thing I had imagined. Using my newfound control, I would escape this Hero in style.

I could become anything in the world at that moment, but not for a second had I considered becoming human. That form was dead and old. Instead, I reveled in the sound of newly formed wings beating against the air. It was music to my ears.

The body strained as it cycled through different designs at incredible speed. Much longer than a blob or an insect form, flight took trial and error to settle in. I had to hollow out my bones and try several configurations of their organization before finally, painfully, the wings began to create lift.

In my high, I hadn't worried about the sound I was making, or the fact that I was burning through the Crystal at a metabolic rate faster than any other Super might have managed. 

As soon as I took to the air, feeling the ground grow distant beneath me, I was the happiest man in the world. My wingspan stretched out across the sky and I climbed higher and higher. So much open and unclaimed space grew in my vision.

Inevitably, the Hero had seen me as soon as he left the attic of the church. His hand jutted outward to strike with deadly accuracy. There was no way for me to dive or transform quickly enough to dodge what came next.

A red hot beam of light tore through the thin skin of my wings along with much of my torso. The Crystal had kept me from instant vaporization, but only barely. The light passed through its structure, for the most part, giving little protection.

I plummetted to the earth from out of the vast sky. I had never felt freer in my life, flying, but it had not been to last. More open and clear than the ocean. More beautiful, too. But it was all taken away in an instant.

My healing attempted to put me back together before I actually hit the ground, but it was clumsy from the overcharge of energy and the difficult form I had taken. With so much mass missing, it couldn't figure out how to evenly redistribute in time. Even with the added mass and energy of my new storage, there simply wasn't enough time.

I cratered into one of the Favela houses with a plume of dust and debris. There I laid in the wreckage of someone's home, hoping no one had been hurt by my fall.

What a rush that had been. Starting to come down now, I was sad to see it go.

The Hero flew to the spot directly above me and looked down at the lifeless prehistoric bird there. I did not move or breathe, hoping he might leave. His covered face betrayed no emotion as he pondered such a decision. He wore a standard military uniform with only a decorative black helmet to mark him as a Super. Unceremonious wear, meant for killers, not propaganda pieces. 

At last, he chose to take no chances. The Hero's hands splayed open towards the ground and started to glow. He was going to destroy this building and me inside it using a massive charged attack.

With the Crystal almost depleted and a sense of over-use and exhaustion starting to overtake my Power, I had one last trick up my sleeve. I could abandon ship.

Appearing as no more than a small mouse, impossible for him to see through the smoke and rubble, I sprinted away from the corpse of my old form. My consciousness jumped to the tiny break-away vessel with no effort and I fled for my life.

Even with all my hubris, death was not impossible.

The world had grown uncomfortably large and reeking of danger at my new size. As I ran away and leaped from one of the building's windows into the alley, I saw the world become engulfed in red light behind me.

Though I splatted against the concrete outside, I was able to slowly drag my pieces back together there. The Hero, nodding once in satisfaction that the Kizmet was dead, stayed no longer than he had to. His imposing figure ascended out of sight into the cloud layer, flying away without another thought.

Someone else would clean up his mess, of course.

Meanwhile, I had become a rat in the city of filth. Though I wanted perhaps to be a bird, my Power was no longer taking requests. The Crystal was exhausted from my system and I would have to wait. What energy stores I had could be used to grow, but as I scurried off, I knew it wouldn't be enough. I would have to forage the garbage until I could move up to hunting street animals, slowly developing my form back to its glory.

That bastard had ruined a lot of work with his attacks. The Favela was teeming with people woken up by the noise now, and I had to watch my step. To make things worse, the scent of feral cats was everywhere.

I came to rest by the front of the church steps, gazing at the dead police and gang members in the street nearby. Luckily, I could recover some of the fat I had left to spoil in the attack. That would go a long way towards recovering my mass.

In the end, my excitement was not so crushed anyway. The sky was still above me, and now I knew that I could return to it. There were a lot of things in life I was uncertain about. My goal, to grow and reach my potential, had no particular path. I had very few plans for the future. Only ideas for how I might progress. But I had a glimpse now of what that amazing potential held. The Crystal showed me what I could become with more practice and strength.

Instant mutation! Better yet, the cells had listened to my commands. They had shown me the open expanse of the sky and a new and powerful form. With the more efficient means of storage that I had developed, I would be able to permanently heal with less worry of diminishing my mass in the process. All from a singular dose of the Crystal.

The future was bright, despite the fact that I was a weak little rat sitting exhausted on the curb. So bad was my Power's depletion that I lacked the strength to move.

Perhaps, I thought, I will just become a plant for a little while and feed on the sunlight. Everyone needed a break now and then.

But there was work to be done. I couldn't deny, my mind was stuck on the Crystal. The easy way to so much of my potential was a tempting thing. 

Maybe, just maybe... I would find some more and take it.