V-00001.2 – Easy Breezy Lemon Freezie.
Looking down at my black sweater, I considered wearing it again to help deal with the wind chills. “Fuck that I’d rather be able to cut glass with my tits rather than put the puke blood rag back on.” Leaning down, I reached into my bag and grabbed a pack of cigarettes from it.
Pulling a fag out of the pack, I pressed it to my lips and lit the end as I took a drag. Letting out a puff of tobacco smoke as I looked around the forest, the beauty of the place was still breath-taking, and it was exactly what I needed: distance.
"Mm, I would kill a nun with a croissant for a joint though.”
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck is the matter with you?”
"Hey, don’t blame me, Vik; you’re the filthy-minded asshole who is wondering if you can kill someone with a croissant.”
I stretched, locking my fingers together and cracking my back, raising my arms up, and popping my fingers, elbows, and shoulders while I inhaled on the cancer stick between my lips.
“Where the fuck am I?” I said as I began walking around the woods, intent on exploring, getting the lay of the land, and maybe just maybe, if God’s willing, which I know he damn well isn’t, figuring out where I am in relation to the city.
Walking through the Alaskan wilds, I noticed something strange; my tracks felt clear as day; scanning around, it was like I had a sixth sense for what was my doing on the run over here. Broken branch here, a dug-up bit of earth there, the kind that could easily be from any wild animal or just a bit of wind, yet I knew with a certainty this was where I had leapt a root or twisted hard to change direction.
After a few hours, I had trekked over a small stream and several smaller hills and found where the woodlands gave way to the large clearing between Anchorage’s main entrance road. Just up ahead of me, I could see a few splatters of dirty red where I had spilled my blood, and beyond that, towering monoliths of concrete, steel, and glass.
I chuckled softly. “Almost feels like a bad omen, doesn’t it?” I said to myself as I turned on my heels and started to walk away satisfied with my progress. I was just about to begin running back when I saw the most unusual thing I had seen since the start of all this shit, even more unsettling than the blood red screen that told me to kill, a very nice addition to the voices that also told me to kill.
It was a rabbit, or so I thought, except its ears came up to just above my knee, and it looked like it had a serious steroid problem that it wanted to make my problem. Its waist was lean instead of fluffy, and its fur was short except around its shoulders and chest, which were thick like a mantle of white hair. Its mouth was grotesque with long, needle-like fangs that seemed to make it difficult to close its mouth, and the things paws.
My fucking god did it change my understanding of the phrase ‘put your paws up.’ The thing had extra joints in its paws like half fingers with huge filthy claws that put the nails of the coyote I fought to shame.
“That is a fucking monstrosity,” I whispered silently as I watched it act like a normal rabbit and not The Rabbit Dwayne Johnson. It just milled about chewing on some blades of grass and barely took any notice of me except for the twitch of its ear that told me it knew I was in the area and didn’t particularly care yet.
I thought about just making a run for it, just pulling myself up by my big boy pants and saying fuck that. Then a thought occurred to me about what I’d said about the system having been awarding me EXP, and I realized that yeah, I can regenerate, and I'm pretty damn irresponsible with my wellbeing, definitely stupid enough not to consider the consequences.
I stooped down and picked up a sizable piece of flint from the ground and stepped partially out of cover. I arced my body, twisting back and extending my left arm all the way out, raised my foot like a pitcher, and then all at once I slammed my foot down and untwisted my body, throwing.
The rock skidded through the air in a fast ball. Special Wolverine would have wet himself too and hit the roided-up gremlin hard in the mouth. There was a crunching sound like shattering glass as the rock took several teeth out of its mouth before flying off.
With its mouth dripping blood, it turned and looked at me, seeming significantly more pissed off than afraid of me, despite the fact that I literally towered over it in every way possible.
“I get the honest and sincere feeling I just fucked around and that I am about to find out.”
And as if those words were a starting gun, the things legs coiled up and launched at me like a speedball, its front legs stretching out in a lunge as it attempted to gore me.
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The world slowed as I watched this thing fly through the air frighteningly fast considering how slow everything was going to me at the moment. I began attempting to twist my body when my instincts shouted in my head that I had to do anything else. My body was already half way twisted around with the motion, and I had no fucking clue which of my limbs I could get between me and the thing if I wasn’t meant to dodge.
Oh, FUCK IT.
I gave up on the idea of fighting this thing like a reasonable person because a reasonable person wouldn’t have cast the first stone at Bug’s Bunny after the roid rage episode.
I met its lunge with one of my own, abandoning the movement I was making as I threw my weight against the leaping rabbit. I hunched and opened my mouth wide, curling my lips into a snarl, and I snapped them shut as I bent down and grabbed the thing out of midair with my teeth holding it by the back of its neck.
It hissed and mewled at me and started scratching my digging its terrible nails into my collarbones, and I could swear to every god known and forgotten that this thing's claws were fucking serrated.
Biting down harder I felt my jaw cramping up for the first time since I obtained the crushing maw mutation; its pelt was so springy and rubbery my teeth just wouldn’t puncture it, but I could feel the bones in its neck shifting under the sheer force of my bite. Raising my head high, I whipped my head back and forth, twisting my upper body with the motions as I tried to mangle the thing.
Reaching up, I grabbed onto its paws, trying to stop it from scratching me, and while it wasn’t strong, it was disturbingly strong compared to its size; its musculature suggested it was strong for a rabbit, but in reality, it felt like I was wrestling a 13-year-old. I managed to get it under control and pulled on its legs as I ripped with my mouth, and this was finally too much; its pelt was being stretched too far to resist my teeth, and they finally got the tension they needed to dig into the rabbit's flesh.
My canines penetrated the rabbit, and its delicious blood flowed into me, seething the flaming cuts on my collar before easing and massaging the muscles in my shoulders back to perfect condition. Then, like a damn bursting, the rest of my teeth dug into the rabbit, and I felt them connect with its spine and shatter it. The rabbit went limp as I let go of its legs and whipped my head again; a chunk of flesh remained in my mouth, and the rest of the rabbit slammed into a tree.
Swallowing hard, I spoke, “You know, I think I'm getting used to my meals putting up a fight on the way down... kind of starting to like it too.”
“You’re a real sick son of a bitch, Viktor.”
“You’ve met my mother; you know good, and goddamn well I am.”
I walked over to the rabbit’s body and held it up over my head and contorted its body, twisting it like a blood-soaked rag and squeezing it hard to get any remaining blood that I hadn’t painted the forest with; the blood had an addictive quality to it that I just couldn’t get over, the same with its meat. I stood in the patch of trees, tearing into the thing like I was a goddamn savage.
Wonder if I got anything new.
[Trait Eater: New Genus discovered
[Parasite: Lepus-Fortis Consumed + 1 Agility]
[Lepus-Fortis Slain experience Acquired]
[Congratulations Viktor Bloodstone you have gained a level. you have been awarded + 5 free attribute points, + 1 skill point.]
A shudder rang through my body as my nerves were hit by a wave of static, and my muscles flexed cramped and relaxed all at once. A soft numb pain spread over me like heated millimeter-thin needles were pricking my nerve endings.
Name: Viktor Bloodstone
Level: 2
Age: 18
Species: Human (HYBRID)
Archetype: Occultist
Classes:
==== ATTRIBUTES ====
Strength: 7
Agility: 6
Dexterity: 7 (-1)
Vitality: 6 (-1)
Sense: 10 (+3)
Wisdom: 11
Intelligence: 11
Glamour: 5
==== SKILLS ====
Animal Instinct – 1
Mana Sense – 1
==== SPELLS ====
==== ABILITIES ====
Parasite – 1/7
==== MUTATIONS ====
SELFISH GENE (UNIQUE)
TRAIT EATER (RARE)
IMMUTABLE (UNCOMMON)
MUTAGEN (UNCOMMON)
Stocks:
[Musculature: 78]
[Bone: 25]
[Blood: 8]
[Organ: 32]
[Free Attribute points: 5]
[Skill Points: 1]
“Well shit… Five whole points, based on what the averages were like. I gotta guess that a point means quite a bit. Let’s think about this: if I assign one point to my strength and two to my agility and one to dexterity, that would put me above average for a human in all my combat effective stats. Well, not counting Vitality, which could really bite me in the ass at some point, but I guess for now at least Parasite can shore up those weaknesses.”
“You know Viktor that minus one concerns me; it means that Parasite isn’t healing you fully. It seems there’s a pretty serious limit to what it can do considering that even with all the fresh blood and meat you can find, your penalty isn’t going away completely... And you still have scars after you take a significant enough injury.
“I know and I agree that is a problem, but I just don’t think I have the luxury of worrying about that right now. Besides, if I increase my vitality, there’s no guarantee I won’t still be crippled by it; it might just let me handle it better, so I’d rather keep my fighting stats high and reinforce the stats my archetype will focus on.”
I directed my thoughts at the status screen, allocating my free points: one strength, two agility, one dexterity, and one wisdom.
Pain hit me in a wave this time as my nerves felt like they were being penetrated by hot needles that gouged and rewired and tacked shit onto my nervous system; my musculature all over my body seemed to liquefy; I felt weak and gooey like I was made of gelatin; then I felt my muscles being stretched like a tarp.
They flexed hard, solidifying into a new shape. I felt and looked like I’d put on five pounds of muscle all over; my thighs, calves, biceps, and forearms that were already large only increased in size a little, but all the other parts of my body that I’d neglected and that had begun to atrophy since my condition worsened had broadened and reshaped back into their prime. During this whole process, there was this soft haptic buzz in my skull that I was vaguely aware of but could barely feel, let alone focus on, as my body rebuilt itself from the ground up.
My arms and legs had tightened up, sloughing off their atrophy and fat, and my chest, waist, and back had built bigger and leaner, the muscle packing in tightly to align me closer to the fighting shape I had as a kid.