By the time the poison that forced its mind to stillness had faded and it had gotten its bearings, it had become distinctly aware of three very strange things.
One, it was not dead. Which was a pleasant surprise that made it very confused, because why were the humans trying to catch it? Food for later?
Two, it was actually tied up in a way that made it nigh impossible to do anything. Both its front paws were dragged behind its back, then put into two very tight cuffs, with two metal spheres sitting tight around its newly formed paws, while the same went for its bottom feet, each individually shoved into a tight, locked sphere of iron.
Then there was some weird cage of metal very tightly affixed to its snout and clamped onto its head for stability with leather strips, so it couldn’t bite anything if it tried. Its tail was the only thing that had any semblance of mobility right now.
It wasn’t helpless, but it was fairly close.
It was a very anxiety-inducing realization.
Three, whoever caught it had somehow fixed a lot of its injuries overnight. The superficial ones, at least, like some of the muscle tears and burnt skin. Its bones still felt frayed and fragile, and its body was still in pain, but it felt much better.
It assumed that the human had given it one of their weird healing vials while it was out, which it wouldn’t complain about, but why? It didn’t make any sense to heal your food. It also didn’t make sense to go through all this trouble just for food, considering how much easier it would be for a human to feed itself without going through the task of restraining it like the human had.
It had left an entire six foot long pile of meat right next to itself. What was the point of grabbing the wolf? Humans made no sense. It was so annoying.
Maybe they had some actual reason. Maybe they just got curious about how different it looked to the average canine and wanted to poke at it, which was what the wolf would do in their position, or maybe they knew it was a wolf and…
That thought led it down a dark trail of increasingly worrying ideas, because it was then that it questioned: If they knew it was a wolf, and went to such trouble to capture it, what was the reason? Why was itself the only wolf it had ever seen in the human nest? Did humans collect them? Or kill them? Why?
Would it meet other wolves if it just waited in its cage to see what would happen? Should it do that?
It was both confused and hesitant, but with the amount of questions that were mounting up, and the lack of answers only continuing, it discarded that trail of thought.
Mostly because its own survival was much more important than getting to meet another of its kin, and it had no reason to believe humans knew what it was. They most likely just wanted to poke and prod it precisely because of their lack of knowledge. Which was a much more optimistic line of thinking than "they might just want their food fresh".
It twisted, trying to get comfortable, and grumbled at the needle-like pinpricks racing up and down its forearms.
It was so annoying.
Another thing that had severely annoyed it was the fact that it hadn’t been able to dissect the poison at all. By the time its mind began functioning again, it had only managed to decode the way it seemed to change its own composition all the time by using various chemical reactions and unique gland cells, not all the variations that poison had.
It was immune to about three of them. It had no idea how many more variations there were.
It was something it lightly modified and added to its own paralysis poison, that pattern of mild but constant change, with about three different, equally potent variations, which then transitioned into the tedious process of preparing its immune system and mana cells into attacking any of its own stray poison that might end up in its bloodstream. But that was the only current good that had come of the whole ordeal, besides it not being slow-cooked over a fire right now.
It grumbled in frustration, still trying to get comfortable, twisting around the tight confines of its cage, which would be little better than paper if it could move. The lack of a thumb bone should have made it easy to slip the cuffs off, but they were tight enough to cut off circulation, and moving around only made them tighter, somehow.
And without any momentum, it was fairly sure it couldn’t just snap the device apart with brute force.
The front door to its cage seemed fairly loose, thankfully, so it did the only thing it could.
Which was to very, very awkwardly curl up against the back of its cage, position its shoulder to the door, and start trying to bust through with sheer force of boredom and frustration, using its tail like a weak piston to add momentum.
That ‘padlock’ thing looked brand new and solid, but it had nothing better to do than test the structural stability of its cage before its captor returned in the vague hope the latches the padlock was going through would snap.
Or rather, that was its internal explanation for the illogical action of wanting to pound out its frustrations on something before resting and healing itself.
Despite its back paws being encased in metal spheres and sliding all over the floor, it was able to squeeze itself into the corner by shuffling around with its shoulders before exploding forwards, its left shoulder slamming into the door as its head and snout ground against the floor, lacking room to twist.
As the metal banging of its cage door filled the small, metal room it was in, covered in tossed aside fabrics, the cloying scent of an aged human male, and with a single window filtering yellow light through its bars from the other side of the room, its vibrations picked up on something.
Something both infuriating and hopeful, that made it pause in the middle of dragging its shoulder across the metal for another crash.
It was a little metal lock that held its cuffs closed. Or at least it felt like a lock.
Its cuffs were essentially just a rectangular piece of metal with two holes in it that led to the spheres around its hands, with two chains on the inside that would tighten whenever the wolf moved, locking them in place and tightly curled into fists. The mechanism was… mind-bogglingly complex.
However, there was a tight seam running through the rectangle between its wrists, of interlocking pieces and fine machinery within. It was a circular arrangement, of multiple dozen little pieces, and it was all wrapped around a locking mechanism that was by comparison, quite simple.
Which was not simple at all, the more it parsed through the vibration’s information.
How did it know what a locking mechanism was?
It didn’t. It just had a vague image in its head of what one was supposed to look like, much like all the other information in its head about machinery that had proven utterly worthless.
Until now.
It knew that humans would somehow fiddle with these lock things, and they would pop open. Though this lock seemed different, it had seen humans messing about with a padlock many times. And it had a perfectly mobile tail that it could use to fiddle with said locks, much like a human, minus the fingers.
It took a deep, long breath, and let it out in a growl.
It hated how helpless it felt, and was thus more than willing to keep slamming into its cage's door. But all that would likely accomplish was making the wolf exhaust itself.
So it started flaring its antennae instead, twisted as much as it could, the side of its face being squished against the bars as its bulky upper body prevented it from turning around, and began kicking at the floor, the iron spheres around its back paws making the process extremely strange and awkward.
It didn’t take long for it to learn everything there was to learn about the lock, its antennae easily feeling all the minute details of its innards.
But seeing and feeling a mechanism was not even close to enough for the wolf to puzzle out how it actually functioned. It was full of little springs and cylinders and a lot of tiny, twisting parts, but, to put it bluntly, it was all useless information, because the wolf had no idea how any of it would or should move.
Something was obviously meant to be put into the hole, and that was the only concrete, useful information it had garnered about it.
It wanted to sleep and maybe put everything it had learned about that spearhead shark to use, which was a lot of things, but at the same time, it was a bit hesitant.
When it had no room for error, it could not really experiment with its body. It could add that braided muscle, but its bones were made to bend. The sheer power of those muscles contracting would turn its body into a squiggly, bendy mess whenever it went all out due to all muscles being connected to bone and using it as a base for their power.
It was fairly sure that feeling its bones twist and bend mid-fight would only be disorienting and confusing.
And it could densen its bones to compensate, severely limiting the bendy nature of them in favor of stability and power.
But it was just too hesitant to try and escape the human nest while not being fully sure of what its body was doing and was capable of. Experimentation was for when it had room and time to commit to it, and a relative guarantee that it wouldn’t trip over its own feet.
As it squeezed its sleep-sack dry to go back into [Devourer], it sighed and watched its moss-covered bottom half, admiring the pretty light, until its eyes grew heavy and ‘sleep’ embraced it once more.
It only increased its inner plant-based armor to wherever it could without limiting its mobility, adding a few wide strips of braided wood-like fibers across its abdomen and some small patches along its arms, then added the braided muscles it had gained from the spearhead shark to its tail to increase its strength and mobility. The plant fiber armor changes would likely be completed far too late and were still ridiculously costly, but it had enough essence to not worry about its resources for the moment.
Another thing it changed was something it very much regretted.
The moss-fur.
It had taken way too long, it felt a little too heavy, too inflexible to be comfortable, and would likely not be as good of an armor as its normal fur was. Coupled with the plentiful sources of food around the human nest and its impending escape, it didn’t have any real reason to have it. It was an interesting experiment and it looked nice, but that was it. It got rid of it all, replacing it with its normal, coarse, thick fur.
After directing additional essence to healing its injuries, it added a few antennae to its tail. It had enough Intelligence to not get overwhelmed, so it was no problem.
Afterwards…
Well, all it could do was try to puzzle how to unlock its cuffs, and wait to learn its fate. But first, to jam the chains around its wrists.
Red, writhing veins of fat tissue and nerves crawled out of the little pockets on its forearm, some thick, some as thin as strings, and slime quickly followed, squirming between, and within all the mechanisms that moved the chains.
It retracted them, content with knowing they would soon dry and jam everything inside, and rested.
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There were two locks on the door of the room. One seemed to be… logically impossible. But based on how it would pop open when the human would prick his hand with a needle and push it onto the lock, it assumed it had something to do with mystical human stuff it couldn’t understand.
Thus, it ignored it, flexing its wrists to try and get some blood into them. Jamming the tightening mechanisms hadn't worked unfortunately, unlike what it had expected, and the cuffs were thus as tight as ever.
The second lock was much more useful, because it very closely resembled the mechanisms between its wrists.
Unfortunately, the human wouldn’t use the damn thing. He’d always come into the room, try to prod the wolf with a needle, which it fiercely objected to, managing to break three of them before the human stopped trying to use its oddly specialized stick to poke it through the bars, then sit around for a bit, fiddling with the human communication device for an hour at a time before talking to someone for three minutes.
Then he would just go outside, lock the door using the blood-lock, and walk away, further than its perception could reach.
It was infuriating, and it could do nothing but inwardly fantasize about ripping him apart for being so frustrating without likely even realizing it.
And capturing it. That too.
Another thing that was a simultaneous problem and a boon, was time.
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It had spent about two days under this covered cage as far as it knew, judging by nothing but instinct, and while that granted the wolf plenty of time to rest and the possibility of its inner plant-fiber armor to be done by the time its escape started, it was both bored and anxious the entire time, and that combination was really wearing its patience and nerves thin.
At least it had plenty of time to practice human speech and nitpick its body for tiny improvements to make, like making its blood clot faster when exposed to open air, making its tendons even thicker, and adding some reinforcement to the shoulder joints.
Because flexibility sacrificed stability, and it was tired of its shoulders popping out of their sockets during fights. It happened with the golem and the shark, and it was a huge annoyance beyond the pain.
With a long, long exhale of boredom, it got back to practicing the words its human had taught it.
Head, neck, chest, stomach. Oh, and haste.
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Its ears straightened as its head tried to snap up. Its antennae started writhing as for once, the human did not stop at merely using the blood lock as he left, but started pulling some bits of metal out of his pocket.
A change of routine.
The human brought his hand to the door’s handle, and to the lock beneath it. [Bloodrush] activated, its Perception getting boosted by the Skill just well enough for it to feel everything within. The little metal thing, which the ether informed it was a key, its grooves, the way the key entered and the pins were pushed up one after another.
Then a twist while the free moving little cylinders of the lock moved, and the mechanism locked the door as the human walked away once more.
The wolf was far too busy thinking about the contraption to pay attention to the human’s retreat.
It was…
Actually rather simple, after seeing it in action. All the pins and springs were of a different length, all it had to do was align the pins with a groove on the inside of the lock, and then the whole cylinder could twist.
Of course, the key to the door had about five large pins while the one inside its cuffs had about twelve tiny ones, but it knew exactly what to do now to escape, assuming that locking was the same action as unlocking, but in reverse. Which, by simple observation, seemed to be the case.
It knew that actually making a key on its tail made of bone, while judging the proportions on nothing but feel, would be an exercise in delicate attention and a lot of frustration, but it was all it had to work with.
Its antennae writhed with the spheres and on the fringes of its cage, its tail twitching ever so slightly as it moved along the edges, and it hurriedly put itself to sleep to get to working on the key.
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The human got back a lot faster than it had expected. Just an hour later, he’d unlocked the door, then started erratically picking things up and tossing them aside, then pacing, before eventually going to the corner, reaching over an oddly shaped metal bowl-thing embedded into the wall, and turned a handle on top of the metal pipe that was aimed into the bowl.
It was very strange to feel water rushing straight up within a pipe, and the wolf idly wondered how long it’s been since it last actually drank something that wasn’t blood. It kind of missed the taste of water, that refreshing feeling. The specks of dirt in it just added texture, in its opinion.
After this was all done with, it was going to find a nice spot to drink water at, even if it had no need for it due to [Devourer].
After a couple minutes of the human drinking water and pacing, the wolf grew bored. And it still had a key to design, so it prepared itself to sleep once more.
Then the human picked up a familiar blanket, and walked over to the wolf’s cage, and it felt with puzzlement as the blanket was thrown over the top of its cage. Again.
It sat unmoving, blinking at the brown covering on its cage.
That was… Just annoying. Watching the new colors was at least entertainment. The dull brown was boring.
Then it felt the human take out a knife, and it tensed, minute complaints forgotten, poison fang ready to try and reach through the bars and neutralize the man. The bars were tight and its tail was thick, so it couldn’t quite reach, but it could at least try.
The man grabbed onto the blanket, and cut four lines into it, above the metal holds at the four corners, then got to work on putting the holds through the blanket, and the wolf relaxed as it realized what he was doing.
Then the human sheathed his knife again, and put his hands on the circular holds, bending his knees and tightening his core.
Oh.
This was going to be horrible.
Its cage rocked, and with a heave, the human slid the cage over his knees, dangling and holding it over his pelvis as he straightened.
“Fucking… hundred pound mutt.” The human grunted.
It was, indeed, horrible. It hated every second of it as the human stiffly walked back to the door, every motion rocking its body back and forth and to the sides.
The door swung open and was quickly kicked shut. The human readjusted his grip a little, and walked out into the outside world. Its eyes curiously flicked to the edge of its cage, under the blanket, its discomfort momentarily forgotten.
It was instead replaced by a primal, instinctive fear, its body locking up as its eyes widened.
The fear of heights. Which it didn’t have, it thought, but the sheer amount of empty space between itself and the ground was so vast that it couldn’t help it.
That would explain why it couldn’t feel the ground anywhere, just a vast expanse of metal above the room and a complex of metal beneath its feet before its senses faded.
The thin, grated walkway they were on was more of a series of thin galvanized metal platforms stapled onto the side of a small complex of metal rooms, all seemingly designed for humans to live in. And said metal rooms were hanging off the bottom of a gargantuan plate of metal, like a... blocky beehive.
It felt its stomach churning uncomfortably with every step as the human turned to the right and began walking in the opposite direction of where he’d come from, the mixture of primal fear and intense discomfort actually making it nauseous.
It had the comfort of knowing there were another dozen walkways spaced in the exact same manner just beneath it, but that was a thin comfort considering that it could see the lights of the human nest so impossibly far away that they were blurry despite its humanoid eyes.
Never once had it thought something so all-encompassing and endless as the human nest could be reduced into nothing but tiny little boxes and moving dots the size of ants, light crystals the size of a pinprick in the distance.
And there were so many layers to the whole thing, platforms and bridges and wire lifts connecting it all together.
It even saw purple somewhere, before it winked out of existence. It was the most bizarre color it had ever seen.
The sight, in total, was both mesmerizing and terrifying.
The human walked past a couple rooms much like his own, through a strange little room filled with cables and mechanisms oddly reminiscent of the human speaking device, before the walkway curved right, leading to a roughly rectangular staircase, extending all the way to the bottom of the complex building, and all the way up above, through the giant metal plate above.
If the human walking made it nauseous, it would have dry-heaved when their upwards journey began, had the overlaying grates of the staircase not hidden the endless drop below, each step swinging the cage left and right in the human’s arms.
The vibrations, already faint and muddled due to being filtered through the human’s flesh before reaching the wolf’s cage and tail antennae, didn’t provide much insight into where exactly it was. The tight, cramped staircase just went on and on, up and up, seemingly nailed into place within an empty metal shaft, judging by the redundant wires and random open pipes, sealed shut with some kind of solidified… rock-like paste?
The word ‘concrete’ came to mind, as if it was its own thought, as if it was just remembering something it had briefly forgotten, and it resisted the urge to growl at the word.
It knew that it did not know what ‘concrete’ was, and the fact that there was something just randomly planting knowledge into its head without asking was mildly discomforting. Even if it was useful information just before, considering the ‘lock’ mechanisms, and never a negative thing so far, right now it was a rather irritating reality.
Or maybe it was just more irritated about its situation being outside of its control and it was more easily frustrated than usual because the human was swinging it around like he was trying to make the wolf retch.
It had absolutely no trouble with motion sickness. It could run in a circle for an hour and only come out of it mildly disoriented.
But that was because it could control or at least feel how its body was going to move, allowing it to mentally and physically brace itself for it.
This had no rhythm, and the human’s gait was so sloppy it was a wonder on how this thing was what caught it. It didn’t have much in the way of pride, but this was just… insulting. A single flick of its claw and this human would drop dead. Or would stumble over his own uneven feet and drop into the void below.
A particularly uneven step made the human overstep to balance, smacking his shoulder into the metal wall, and coincidentally, the wolf’s cage.
It snarled, jamming its legs into the corner to ram its shoulder into the left-side bars of its cage, the impact further imbalancing the human and almost making him fall on his ass as his breath was driven out of his stomach.
Then he suddenly just seemed to lose all signs of weakness and tiredness, stiffening his body, and clumsily straightening himself, fixing his grip on the handles of the cage and re-adjusting the cage to be supported by his stomach.
It stiffened in surprise, then its eyes widened.
That was almost exactly what the wolf itself had done many times. Make a mistake, stumble, get tired. And then it would activate [Bloodrush], one of the Skills it had been given by the symbols, and move on, energy renewed and with more than enough power to compensate for crappy balance and position.
And that made it question whether or not the humans had the symbols too. Because the way the human had so stiffly and quickly recovered, it screamed of him activating a Skill.
It… Frankly was not sure why it had assumed that nothing else had access to the symbols. It had chalked up any strange things, biological impossibilities and strange developments it had seen to the humans’ mystical ways of using the mana energy, such as that terrifying metal-head human that was dead yet moved around as if living.
“To think I had to kill Niet, just to have to do this shit by myself…” The human’s withered voice grumbled, and their journey continued.
It kept relatively quiet, feeling oddly shaken and unsure by what it had just noticed. Humans’ biology cemented them as weak and absolutely worthless without their tools. But in an actual fight, it was confident it could just easily kill any human, because their biology was just… pitiful. They had really good stamina and reach, and that was about it.
But if they had access to the symbols, every encounter it would have could be completely different. One human could have put everything in Endurance, thus rendering it a useless scratching post for the wolf, while another could have poured everything it had into Speed, and simply ran around the wolf in circles, or just ran away entirely without the wolf being able to do something about it.
If humans had access to the symbols as well as all their crazy mechanisms and mana-constructs, it would actually have to rethink how it distributed its Attribute points.
Endurance and Intelligence was already a rather thin strategy for its physical wellbeing, considering the various tricks and tools the humans had at their disposal, but if they had access to the symbols as well, then almost every Attribute gained value. Nothing incredible, but something to think about. Speed would have to be the next Attribute it could invest in, considering it had just acquired braided muscles, which were easily twice as strong as its regular ones, and...
Once it had some room to breathe, it would sit down and think about all this in a bit more depth.
At least the human seemed to be paying more attention to the rocking of its cage now, so it forced itself to calm down and curl into a ball, narrowed eyes glaring at the glimpses of the outside world it could see through the fluttering of the blanket covering it.