Daphne circled around the void-leaking squawker. Undecided.
Should she kill it? Yes, she definitely should.
As she was now in very close proximity to the squawker, her Water Control was giving her extremely detailed information about it. The creature was wrapped in dead plant fibers. Some of them were twisted into very complex fibrous tendrils, if you unwrapped them and stretched them out, they would reach almost all the way across the channel. Under these twisted things, the squawker had strange sheets of fiber that were interlocked in very complex ways, several of them covering the squawker’s body. There was a smaller one covering the squawker’s head, it had filled with void and was bulging upwards towards the surface as bubbles of void leaked out and dribbled up.
She didn’t like these dead fibers between herself and the prey. This bizarre squawker was so clearly weak and pathetic here, totally unsuited to the water. If she removed its covering before she killed it, she doubted it could hurt her or escape.
She began experimenting with her Water Control, making very concentrated pulses of water that cut through the fiber wrappings around the squawker. She was delighted with the usefulness of these tiny jets of super-high-pressure water. She could imagine all sorts of uses in combat and in disassembling future prey.
Within moments, the ropes holding the squawker were severed into many small pieces and the struggling thing scrambled violently towards the surface, trailing scraps of the fiber sheets it had on its body and a trail of blood, some of Daphne’s cutting jets had sliced through its soft skin.
It broke through the surface and made incredibly loud wheezing noises as expelled water from its orifices and sucked in more of the void, freak that it was.
The thing struggled wildly, churning the water with its awkward limbs.
Daphne was satisfied that most of the weird plant fibers were gone. She activated Speed Boost and charged straight for the squawker’s upper abdomen; she could feel the vibrations of its heart beating through the water and charged directly for that spot. The creature didn’t even notice her rapid approach as it coughed and wheezed. When Daphne’s necktooth pierced through the naked void sucker’s back, it gave one last anguished squawk.
Daphne fired a rapid burst of Piercing Barrage, pulping the creature’s heart and lung. It thrashed spasmodically a few times before going limp, floating just under the water’s surface.
Host Daphne has defeated a Homo sapiens Level 1 … Please Stand By…
Homo sapiens are a sentient/uplifted species calculating Level Modifier
Homo Sapiens Level 1 = non sapient animal Level 10 . Level Up!
Bonus for defeating life form 5 equivalent levels higher
Bonus for defeating sentient lifeform. Second Life Skill restored.
Bonus for defeating life form 100X times Host intelligence stat.
Trophic level 5 Diet detritivore, herbivore, omnivore, carnivore Strength 6.0 Stamina 7.0 Agility 7.0
Vitality
25 Bonus Applied
Intelligence
10 Bonus Applied!
Charisma
5.0 Bonus Applied
Spiritual Energy
30
Skills
Piercing Barrage Level 5
Speed Boost Level 5
Iron Chitin Level 4
Water Control Level 4
Second Life Level 1
Daphne was enveloped in the energy of the level-up, she felt her carapace slide away as her body expanded, all of this was the same as former level-ups. Then the energy began centering itself on her eyes and brain, the intensely bright energy blinded her, a kaleidoscope of images and information streamed through her consciousness, concepts she had never imagined blossomed inside her mind. Information about the nature of the world, of spiritual energy, of life and death, of heat and cold, stasis and motion, creation and destruction. All manner of alien concepts cascaded before her mind's eye in a baffling display.
Daphne couldn’t process any of it at first, it was so beyond her frame of reference. Gradually, snippets of ideas would flutter out of the vast flood of information and take hold in Daphne’s consciousness. These tiny ideas, fragments of truth, began collecting together and forcing Daphne’s mind in directions she had never conceived possible; Language, Culture, Cultivation, Evolution, Entropy, Mass, Time, Space, she became aware of them as concepts, ideas.
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Previously, she had been a tiny crustacean, all of her kind lived and died from one moment to the next, every one of her sisters died as prey for something or died of a disaster. The life of a plankton is not designed to understand the great laws of the universe or be able to truly understand any complex thought. Now she could.
Daphne was shocked at the incredible speed of her thoughts now. The rapidity with which she could conceive of complex ideas, plan out careful strategies, ponder the nature of herself now, and her older self. She even wondered if she truly WAS Daphne?
Had Daphne not died on that beach?
Was she Daphne or merely a copy?
She decided that it did not matter. In her mind, she had memories of Daphne from before and after she died on that beach. If she wasn’t truly that original Daphne, then she was unable to tell the difference.
She pulled herself together with a start. This new intellect could really be distracting!
In front of her floated the corpse of the “Homo sapiens”, the system seemed to think it was special in some way. She certainly had gained a great deal from killing it. Looking at its corpse, she could not see much that impressed her. Its body was weak, huge and flabby with no weapons to fight or defend itself with. It was unarmored and completely hopeless for moving in the water. Perhaps it had a shape that was optimized for moving in the void?
But she had observed the birds, they seemed much more agile in the void than these “Homo sapiens” squawkers did.
The only thing remarkable that she could see about the thing was its brain. For the size of its body, Daphne estimated that the squawker’s brain was almost twenty times larger than a fish of the same size. Clearly killing it had given her a huge boost in intelligence, as acknowledged by the system.
She began experimenting with her new use of Water Control, slicing off tiny bits of the squawker and sampling them for spiritual energy. Shockingly, the amount of spiritual energy was incredibly low, the skin, muscle, and the internal organs were almost completely devoid of any usable spiritual energy.
She tried the brain, ugh! The flavor was disgusting. The level of spiritual energy was much higher in the brain tissue, but the flavor was waxy and horrible. She liquefied the brain of the squawker quickly and choked it down with disgust. She felt her spiritual core hum with the increased power as she processed the nasty paste. She sincerely doubted she would be eating ‘Homo sapiens’ again, they were disgusting.
Next squawkers that she sees, she will just kill to see if she can use them to level up, but the spiritual energy she got from this giant corpse was less than she normally could get from killing a single carp. They weren’t worth eating.
She abandoned the corpse and began her slow exploration of the river.
Over the next several days she wove up and down stream as she explored the braided channels of this part of the river. As she did so, she idly hunted salmon as she pleased. The number of salmon streaming upriver had begun to slow, the summer spawning run was coming to a close.
Finally, she found a resting area that met her criteria. A slow backwater between a larger island and a gravel bar. It was choked with thick weeds and several fallen logs. She combed through the channel carefully and killed or drove off any predatory fish or other creature, none of the normal fish could withstand her spirit skills.
When she had the quiet channel to herself, her mind turned inwards to her brood pouch. She had regained her adulthood before this last level-up but had not had time to lay and hatch any daughter-sisters. She had felt urgently that it was time to produce more daughters. Within a day of laying claim to the slow channel, Daphne had laid a pair of eggs in her brood pouch. The precursor to another resting egg began forming as well, so she could now undergo the process of being reborn once again should disaster strike.
Within a day, the pair of daughter-sisters had freed themselves from their eggs and were quietly drifting in place within her brood pouch. Daphne was able to closely examine them using her Water Control senses, the two daughter-sisters were tiny copies of herself, minus the spines. They even had minute spiritual cores already spinning like tiny sparks within them. Her daughter-sisters too would be spirit beasts, from the moment of their birth. Daphne was excited to see her offspring growing stronger. One day, there may be hundreds of her daughters hunting up and down this river. They would grow and multiply, that was their ancient calling.
Another day, and Daphne pushed both her new spirit beast daughter-sisters out into the water of the quiet channel. As she had for her first brood, she quickly caught them several salmon, carefully pureeing them into a fine cloud of delicious food. She watched as they gorged themselves on the delectable fish, amused.
Caring and coddling one’s daughter-sisters was not the way of her kind, however. After a brief period of watching them, Daphne turned and moved down the river. In all likelihood she would never set eyes on these two again. She hoped that they would hunt and fight and produce their own daughters in time.
So many days spent idly giving birth had left Daphne hungry. She was eager to hunt something strong, to defeat a fierce foe and feed on its flesh.
She extended her perception with her expanded range and found one of them, holding still under a fallen log, a long torpedo shaped body with a pair of narrow jaws filled with short, hooked teeth. Even its tongue was covered in back-curved teeth. A pike.
Now she was stronger than she had ever been, it was time to test herself, the birds and the squawking Homo sapiens had not been a threat. She had fought the snakehead and barely won, it was time to duel openly with a strong opponent and test herself.
She swam upward into the clear current, sculling openly towards the pike’s fallen tree. She approached from as clear a position as she could, she wanted to taunt the pike into attacking her. This would be no fight from ambush for her.
She came closer and she could begin to see the pike with her own vision. As still as it was in the shadow of the log, it could easily be overlooked. It was pale silver-gray, with a dense but regular pattern of black spots covering its back then thinning gradually before disappearing to leave a pale white belly. The fish was nearly four feet long, well over ten times Daphne’s size, easily twenty times her weight.
She pulled herself past the pike’s hiding spot with deliberate slowness, sculling with deliberate jerky awkwardness. The pike took her bait eagerly, it charged forwards with violent thrusts of its tail, jaws open wide for a crushing bite.
Daphne shot forward with a burst of speed, just missing the pike’s closing jaws. She angled herself downwards towards the rear of the fish, even as it tried to turn, snapping fruitlessly as she pulled backwards along its body. The pike was far less flexible than the snakehead had been, it could not bend itself so sharply to follow her movements.
Daphne was eager to try her new skills she had developed with Water Control. She made a tiny cutting jet and slashed at the pike’s body. The scales of the pike’s side were fairly strong, and instead of cutting into the flesh she merely scraped the fish’s side and peeled a heavy line of scales off. She continued sculling away past the pike’s tail and using the tiny cutting jet, it scored a line down the pike’s flank then cleanly sliced the lower fluke of the fish’s tail off.
The pike reacted with alarm at this injury, it was not a brave fighter. It turned away from Daphne the instant it felt the water blade cutting into it and moved to flee from the fight. It had realized that Daphne was a dangerous foe, and chose to run.
When would Daphne allow a chosen prey to get away though?
She used her control of the current to quickly spin and then use a burst of Speed Boost to close again on the fleeing fish, she charged in towards its tail and created another water jet, and cleanly cut the rest of the pike’s tailfin off.
The pike’s speed was dramatically reduced without its tail, and it continued to swim forward, hobbled and slow. Daphne closed in carefully and began surgically removing the huge predator's fins, one by one, till it was a finless hulk, wriggling in the water. She positioned herself above it and drove her necktooth into its brain, cleanly dispatching the crippled pike.
Host Daphne has defeated a Esox reichertii Level 2
Daphne began disassembling the huge fish, most of the spiritual energy was in the muscles and the eyes of the ambush predator. The flavor was quite good, clean and mild, it wasn’t as tasty as salmon roe, but it was definitely worth eating.
Daphne realized that she was far stronger than any level 2 animal she might find in the river. She was too strong to duel with even the largest of them. If she hoped for a true fight, she must find other spirit beasts to battle.