[https://i.imgur.com/fa0LiHP.jpg]
Daphne waited at the entrance to the shrew’s tunnel. The daylight grew intensely bright, she had never spent time this close to the surface during the day. She waited patiently, her phyllopods holding her in place at the side of the bank, harvesting greenfood and detritus from the water. The flavor of the suspended plants in the water was quite different here at the extreme edge of the pond, she could taste the flavor of the surface, pieces of plant life from the bank above water were mixed in.
The light grew dim, and night took hold of the world again. She waited and watched. A newt swam past. Then an animal she had never seen, a frog, leapt into the water from the bank, plunging down with a slash of churning bubbles. It surfaced very close to her. She was tempted to break off her vigil and attack. It was in range, and would no doubt provide her with energy and food. Its flesh looked soft, like the newts had.
She turned her attention back to the tunnel, however. She would not allow the attacking thief’s insult to go unanswered. Hunting could wait until she had taken her revenge.
The night passed.
The second day passed.
Daphne waited. She was a creature of the open water, she knew nothing of the soil or tunneling and burrows. It never occurred to her tiny mind that the shrew might have other exits. In fact, the shrew had been entering and exiting the water to hunt all the time she had waited here. Shrews must eat constantly, their speed and metabolism demand that they never stop hunting for more food.
Finally, the shrew returned. The problem was that the shrew came from behind her!
It swam towards the tunnel swiftly, a still struggling minnow clutched in its mouth. Daphne was startled by the water shrews' appearance from this unexpected direction. Her saving grace was how motionless she held herself.
The shrew, like most of its kind, was essentially blind. It ‘saw’ with the long bristling whiskers that surrounded its snout. The slightest movement of the water would be translated to these sensitive hairs and the shrew was capable of instantaneous reaction. They hunted in this way, finding their prey from the ripples they made through the water as they moved.
To the water shrew an object that was motionless was invisible.
The shrew swam directly past Daphne without noticing her and entered the tunnel.
Daphne activated Speed Boost and flung herself towards the shrew, attempting to impale it on her necktooth.
The pressure of her onrushing charge was instantly detected by the shrew, it dropped the minnow in its jaws and curled back towards Daphne with insanely fast reflexes. The cramped terrain was not in its favor. Within the tunnel it could not maneuver away from Daphne’s charge. The skill had been activated very close, so Daphne had not gotten up to maximum speed, but the momentum was still sufficient to pierce straight through the body of the shrew and exit the other side.
The furry animal convulsed at the lance driving through its abdomen. Flailing, trying to pull itself off of the sharp necktooth. Daphne fired a Piercing Barrage, but her tooth was fully passed through the shrew, the barrage fired into the wall of the tunnel on the other side of the impaled animal.
For a few moments, the shrew violently struggled against the lance embedded in its chest, but the necktooth had pierced its liver, both of its lungs and grazed its heart. The damage was impossible to survive, and the shrews hyper-violent heart rate pumped its blood out of its body through the massive wounds. Its death was a certainty.
The shrews dying convulsions tossed them both against the walls of the tunnel. Clouds of mud filled the water and obscured everything. Daphne began angrily sculling backwards to free her necktooth from the shrew’s corpse, but in its dying struggle, Daphne’s tail spine had been embedded in the wall of the tunnel. After some time, she was able to awkwardly inch her necktooth out of the body and slowly pry her spine free of the clinging mud.
Initiate Daphne has defeated a Neomys water shrew Level 2 Level UP!
Initiate Daphne has achieved physiological Adult Status. Daphne is now a full System Host.
Adult Bonus Rewards will begin at all future Level Up stages!
Spiritual Core creation Initiated.
Trophic level- 3 Diet detritivore, herbivore, omnivore, carnivore Strength 2.4 Stamina 2.8 Agility 3.0 Vitality 2.8 Intelligence 0.5 Charisma 0.3 Spiritual Energy
10.0
Skills-
Piercing Barrage Level 2
Speed Boost Level 3
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Iron Chitin Level 1
Water Sense Level 1 NEW!
Water Sense - This skill allows host Daphne to possess full awareness of the water surrounding her in a sphere centered on her spiritual core. Sphere diameter increases with increased spiritual power level. Upgradeable.
The wave of power enveloping Daphne was vastly more powerful than she had ever experienced on prior level-ups. A maelstrom of bright energy surrounded her body as her carapace exploded apart and she grew double in size. She felt her new carapace forming even stronger and more resilient than her first set of Iron Chitin.
All of this was secondary however, because a fierce fire lit inside her carapace, directly in the center of her body, a swirling vortex of heat and light was shrinking and compressing inwards. Daphne’s body burned with the reflected power emitted from the condensing spiritual power. Slowly the light grew dimmer, and the core coalesced into a beating oval of crystal. Her spiritual core. All the spiritual energy she consumed would be stored here, to be purified and strengthened. She was now a true Spirit Beast, and even if the system abandoned her, she would still be able to grow and ascend to greater and greater heights of power, by collecting more spiritual energy.
Daphne reveled in her new self, her adult self. She was now a mature creature, like mother-sister had been. She had a brood pouch of her own, in which she would lay and give birth to daughter-sisters. She would need food in order to do this. She turned to the corpse of the thief, it had drifted further down the tunnel from the violence of her transformation.
She pulverized it with Piercing Barrage and began feeding on the shrew’s remains. She had never eaten a mammal before, it was interesting. On the whole she still found the Carrasius hatchlings to be the most delicious thing she had tasted so far. It was a pity they no longer gave her assistance in leveling.
Her meal finished, she slowly backed out of the tunnel, she almost had grown too large to fit in its narrow confines. She must be careful to avoid tight spaces in the future when she is in danger of leveling.
She began actively hunting again, her larger size required her to perfect an ambush-style. She would seek out a shadowed hollow among the weed beds to wait patiently for prey to enter her range. As soon as she had fed, she would vacate the area before scavengers arrived following the scent trail of her meals.
Days passed.
Now that Daphne had a core and had become an adult, most creatures did not provide her with much spiritual energy at all, she was no closer to leveling than before, despite frequent kills of advanced creatures. She had taken a frog, several newts, and had found a good hunting area to find juvenile Carrasius fingerlings. The juveniles were as delicious as the hatchlings had been, and Daphne frequently returned to this section of the weedbed to hunt the tasty fish.
Over a week passed, and her level remained stagnant. What did change, however, was her body. Her brood pouch had matured, and Daphne could tell that it was finally time for her to birth daughter-sisters of her own.
As day changed to night, Daphne found a secluded hollow in amongst a patch of weeds. Her focus turned inward as she slowly extruded an oblong egg into her brood pouch. Shortly thereafter two more eggs followed it until she had a full clutch. She hovered contentedly, resting from the internal exertion of laying. She stayed still, quietly letting her new eggs adjust to the openness of the brood pouch.
They were something new, these daughter-sisters of hers. Their eggs alone were hundreds of times larger than she had been when she hatched. They were not brought into this world as plankton, as she had been. They were born as a part of the macro-world and would live and die amongst the larger life forms.
________________
The next day, Daphne continued her slow and careful movements through the weed beds. She found a small open pocket in the weeds and began basking there in the warmth of the sun, the warmer water temperatures hastened the hatching of her daughter-sisters. Soon she could feel the minute vibrations from her brood pouch as her daughter-sister’s still soft bodies pushed against the confines of their eggs, seeking to rupture them. One after the other they did, and Daphne could feel their change as the three young crustaceans began freely moving about in her brood pouch.
Daphne then began a hunt, moving to her favorite hunting grounds to attempt to kill another Carrasius fingerling. She thought it might be possible to give birth to her daughter-sisters and feed them some delicious, pulverized fish before leaving them to go on their way.
She leisurely swam to her favorite fish hunting area and settled in to wait. Before long, a chubby Carrasius fish, almost grown out of its juvenile stage, nosed into her range, grazing on the detritus on the bottom. Daphne took careful aim for its head behind the fish’s eye and fired a needle of Piercing Intent. The fish was killed instantly, shuddering and slowly rolling on its side as the bolt of spiritual energy scrambled its brain.
Daphne hovered over the fish and paused as she felt her brood pouch begin to stir. She was consumed with an overwhelming compulsion to push with muscles she had never used before.
In a few moments, the first of her daughter-sisters was released forcefully from her abdomen. She continued pushing and quickly birthed her second. The final daughter-sister took longer, she paused for several minutes before rapidly her contractions expelled the final tiny copy of herself.
The three miniature Daphne’s swam jerkily around her, beginning to filter food from the water with their phyllopods. Daphne was briefly amused at their antics before turning her attention to her kill on the pond bottom. She gave the fish several blasts of Piercing Barrage, transforming the fish into a cloud of tattered meat scraps. She used her phyllopod jets to push the food laden water towards the drifting babies, showing them the deliciousness that was the taste of fish. The daughter-sisters immediately noticed the superior food flowing towards them and began to filter the nutrient-rich fish soup from the water, drifting closer to the kill as they did so. Daphne hovered above them, circling, watching for predators and scavengers as the babies ate their fill.
Soon, the tiny daughter-sisters had satiated themselves, and began to swim away. Daphne made no attempt to herd them or control their leaving or direction. She had already invested far more care in these sisters than mother-sister ever had for her. She was a crustacean, not instinctively inclined to care if her offspring lived or died, as most generally died within hours of hatching.
She began swimming away herself, bemused at the process of becoming a mother-sister. She knew now that her daughter-sisters were also not Daphne. Only she was Daphne. Unique.
That wasn’t to say that these daughter-sisters weren’t special. They were changed. They had been born from an uplifted mother, and some of her increased power had been transferred to them. They were not tiny algae grazers drifting amongst the plankton, they had to strike out amongst the macro-life and fight for food with the fish and frogs and macro-life.
Ahead of Daphne, she spotted one of her daughter-sisters drifting through the weeds. She was already hunting a group of tiny hatchling fish. Daphne watched as the little copy of herself shot a bolt of Piercing Intent into a tiny fish and killed it. It seemed even her skills had transferred to her daughter-sisters. Amazing.
Suddenly, a huge green shape burst from the weeds, exploding from ambush and charging towards the tiny daughter-sister. A gaping mouth closed over the small crustacean before it had a moment to react. Her offspring had been eaten.
Daphne looked at the enormous fish that had just slain her newly birthed daughter-sister. Rippling patterns of green and brown scales coursed down its sinuous body as it jerked to pass its meal down its throat. Long fins ran down its spine and belly, nearly the entire length of the great fish.
A snakehead. One of the most dangerous predators in these waters, a voracious eater of anything it could fit in its massive, long jaws.
Daphne awoke from her shock and charged forwards, blasting the deadly fish with Piercing Intent.