V-00001.3 – Visions Of Fire.

Flexing my new form I stretched and laughed softly. When I tensed, my thighs and calves hardened up like iron spikes ready to dig into the ground, and my abdominals shifted into a wall of muscle.

My chest popped and my arms rippled like steel wires underneath my skin were pulling taught. Focusing my thoughts on my next task as I suppressed my vain desire to marvel at my own form.

I took off into a sprint, inhaling deeply as my feet pounded the earth, and I ran faster than I ever had before. Running had always been my weakness, but right now I felt like I could overtake a bicycle, and it wasn’t even taxing. My joints were sending warning pangs to me, but I wasn’t yet feeling any real pain.

A constant stream of information was assaulting my senses as I looked for random bits of materials and things my mind told me I would need to get myself cemented in the woods at least for now, until I made a trip back to the city for some tools.

I spent the majority of my day gathering up random seemingly innocuous items: rocks, pieces of flint, large sticks, and tons of thin, flexible branches.

Eventually I decided I had enough, and so did my backpack, and I made the trek back to my lake. I took it slower from here on out, keeping myself alert for any possible danger. I didn’t want anything deciding I was an easy meal.

Alaska’s wilds are some of the last truly wild places in the United States, and I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to get mauled by a Kodiak bear or trampled by a moose. I stepped through the trees, walking over my own footprints as I entered the clearing to my lake.

“Home sweet home,” I said with a slight smile upon seeing and feeling the ocean of calmness before me.

“I love what you’ve done with the place, Viktor,” I said again in a more sarcastic tone.

“Jesus Christ, you’re making me consider a lobotomy via a fucking soup spoon.”

“We don’t own any spoons, Viktor... Remember we’re poor and homeless; ring a bell?”

I groaned hard and far louder than necessary, attempting to make my exasperation known to... myself as I sat down at the lake’s edge, pouring my assortment of supplies on the ground. I took an inventory of what I had.

A decent hand full of rocks and smaller stones, some pieces of flint, an absolute ton of lightweight springy branches with a slightly reddish hue to the bark, and a few bigger, thicker sticks that have some real weight and meat to them. Then there’s my collection of hunting knives, flick blades, and throwing knives, my last 3 packs of Marlboro's, and an old scratched-up zippo lighter I had gotten for my birthday when I was a kid.

I began breaking down the springy sticks, snapping them in half, and peeling away the flexible fibrous bark that coated them. I twisted and pulled on the strings of fluid bark, stripping as much of the outer layer as possible until I was left with a light wood-colored fiber. I then began twisting the fibers into twine in a rote fashion as I examined what my new mutation genus gave me.

I was beginning to notice there was a lot of repetition at the common ranks of mutations; thicker skin or hide, denser bones and musculature, claws, and fangs were featured in all 3 of my genus’s in some variation or another, with some having unique things like the Lupine organ systems or the Leporomana’s energy-sensitive whiskers.

I eyed the uncommon tab of the mutation page with greed and annoyance, seeing it was still locked.

Setting aside the length of rope I’d been working on, I grabbed one of the larger, more rounded pieces of stone and began using it like a trowel to dig small divots in the earth. I set up a small circular perimeter of holes in the ground before hammering large sticks into them with the butt of my knife.

Hours passed, but I finally had something that passed as a structure; it was just a set of sticks in the ground in a circle with one long stick in the middle that had long, thin pieces of wood making a bridge between the center piece and the outer perimeter, along with bundles of sticks, grass, and leafy branches lashed together and layered over the sticks for a makeshift roof.

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“Huh… not so bad, Viktor; now we just gotta get some shit together for the walls, and you’ll have an actual place to call home.”

“So... Uh, about that.”

I don’t know how to make them.

“You are fucking with me right?”

“YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO MAKE THE WALLS… Fuck me half a job, Bloodstone Strikes again.”

I stuck my middle finger into the air. “I fell asleep watching the video. What’s your goddamn excuse?”

“Because I don’t have a corporeal form you asshole. You’re the driver here, so why do you keep looking away from the fucking road?”

“Would the two of you give it a fucking rest? You can figure it out later... We have more important shit to do than make walls for your stupid fucking hut; a way to deal with rain is more than enough for now.”

“Like?”

“LIKE STOP WASTING TIME, you went from cripple to athlete just because you killed some shit, while you are fucking around neglecting half your skills and abilities. Do you possibly think that the ARMED GANG, for whom you left a flayed corpse, is preparing for the man in the wolf mask to return?

“I haven’t neglected shit; I’ve been working with what...”

“Shut up, no, you haven’t Jesus Christ. I must be contributing 90% of your wisdom.”

I said in a slightly enraged voice, gesturing out to the water and forest around me.

“Did you not possibly think that this weird omnipresent fucking energy that you’re sensing might be your mana sense working, and that maybe you might consider doing something that would benefit your archetype whose whole focus is on magic?”

I huffed, “Jesus fuck... complain your whole life about there being no such thing as a free lunch, and the moment some asshole gives you a voucher, you forget it’s in your wallet.”

Stepping away from my makeshift hut, I approached the lake and began trying to focus on the sense of energy. As I began to focus my gaze and search for that sensation of being relieved of my burdens I felt once before, I realized it was nowhere to be found; the electric feeling was closer to a violent and reactive static instead of a tingle that just hung in the air.

And when I touched the water and sunk my hands into the currents, I felt no peace. I felt... Anger, a familiar rage... It felt like annoyance and outrage were being played back to me on a feedback loop, and then it clicked that the energy that permeated the water wasn’t angry at me. It was reacting to me like I was an environmental factor; it absorbed the anger and annoyance I had been radiating and matched me pace for pace.

I felt a haptic buzz in my brain, like a soft feeling of static that I had begun to associate with the system gently alerting me I had notifications.

Choosing to ignore it, I closed my eyes and submerged my hands deeper into the icy water, focusing on this sixth sense that somehow interacted with all of my other senses. Shutting out all other sensations, I found that I could still almost see the lake in my mind’s eye; it was blurry and kept moving in and out as if my brain was failing to build a real connection to what it was sensing. I began stretching my awareness, trying to focus on only the immediately surrounding water, and suddenly the image in my mind became far clearer. A picture of glittery deep blue-colored liquid appeared in my mind, and in the center of that vision were two spikes of energy that radiated a bright neon red, and deeper within the red I could see black veins with flecks of white mixed. The black energy looked and felt like a river that rushed endlessly.

I could feel a compulsion within me as I lost myself in the visions of the swirling energy. I wanted to reach out to it, and it wanted me to reach out. I could feel it like one of the voices in my head; it wanted me to reach out and take control.

Trying to raise up my hand in the direction my vision dictated, however, I did nothing. I felt rooted in place, completely paralyzed. I tried desperately to reach forward, flexing my newly enhanced musculature with everything I had, until I had exhausted everything except my will. I kept trying to reach forward, eventually just willing my body to move after my stamina had begun to fail me.

And finally I felt my hand lift stretching towards the thrumming river of darkness. I felt the black veins of liquid power envelope the phantom sensation of my reaching hand and spread up my arms, reaching my heart. I felt my chest heat up, my arms reaching my heart. I felt my chest heat up like a nuclear power core. My chest burned with heat as I watched the white specs slowly get burned from the rivers of black power, as if my body was somehow burning them out of it. Slowly, I could see more and more of the rivers as they spread down into the ground and filled five pathways and welled within a wide central chamber between those five paths.

I could see how they traveled upwards, and black swirling orbs of energy took up the majority of two larger chambers before they spread inwards, allowing the two different rivers to meet in the middle and coalesce into a giant core of darkness that was even now purging the last dregs of white.

The black river flowed downwards in lines from the core, clean lines that reminded me of circuitry, outlined pathways, and chambers contained within the red energy, and as I saw the whole picture, finally I realized I wasn’t looking at chambers but myself.

The circuitry like black rivers had carved themselves into me, burning away the white and red to outline my musculature and skeleton, filling my bones and accentuating my pectoral muscles, my forearms and biceps, my abdominals, and the lines of black ridged my pelvis and showed a clear outline of my thigh muscles, then my calves and spider webbed into my feet, filling the toes and circling the balls of my feet.

The last thing I saw before my vision went completely black was the core of dark energy in my chest pulsing a light wave of black energy filling every millimeter of me before spreading outwards and crashing into the vibrant, bright red aura that enveloped me. Neither energy seemed to win the clash as the black mixed into the red, darkening its color to a dull blood red.

Deep within the earth’s molten core, where 128 different nodes of the Ikarus protocol met to assemble the Genesis Engines subsystem, an alert came through forcing the Ikarus protocol subsystem to take action.

[I knew I was right to notify the Genesis Engine about you, Viktor; letting you die during initialization would have been a waste, a waste of a perfect villain... and far better soldier.]

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