V - 00001.7 - Getting An Upgrade.

Ice water filled my veins as I lunged forward. My limbs grew cold and numb as I kicked off the ground, my feet tearing holes in the earth as I leapt forward. My throat went numb as my vocal cords seemed to freeze during the scream, like I was choking on ice. The sound that came out was a nightmarish shrill savage cry that should have been trapped within nightmares not allowed on this earth. I briefly saw the soundwaves of my voice being carried out with flashes of black, transparent energy following them.

The wolf met my charge with its own charging towards me with its maw widening to receive my Hail Mary attempt at survival. We met somewhere in the middle with the jaws of the wolf snapping around my wrist to intercept my attack. I grabbed its throat with my free hand at the same moment and arched my entire body, straining to lift the unbelievably heavy beast. I slammed it onto the ground hard. Getting pulled down with it as it refused to release its hold on my arm.

We slammed into the dirt floor, each fighting for dominance in a savage fury. The wolf mangled my arm, whipping its head back and forth, scouring the flesh from my bones, and I kicked out, hammering my toes into its guts and ribcage and punching with my free hand.

The cold continued to invade my body as my death was growing closer and closer. I could barely feel my body as I wrapped my legs around its slim waist and twisted my body, dragging the wolf underneath me. It finally let go of my arm as I twisted and reared its head back like a viper before snapping it forward at my neck.

I twisted my upper body, slamming my elbow into its snout, knocking its bite sideways with a crunch, and then I returned my own lunge, throwing my entire upper body down at the creature with my mouth wide, my teeth bit into its maw from the side, my upper and lower jaw crushing its own.

The wolf flailed in my grasp, scratching and trying to rip its snout away from me, but my crushing maw had the upper hand and wouldn’t let go. My teeth broke its skin then tore into flesh and bone, and as the blood rushed down my throat, the cold began to retreat from me. My body became more responsive, and I smashed my fits into its ribs harder with a machine-like autonomy as I bit hard and pulled back, ripping the monsters snout off and swallowing it.

Rearing my head back, I smashed my forehead into the wolf's mutilated head. I heard the sound of bones crunching as my vision went white and filled with stars. Opening my mouth again, I lurched forward with my neck and bit deeply into its neck, my mouth filled with fur as my teeth punched through the rubbery skin like pelt and into the muscle.

It’s struggling slowly came to a stop as I drank down its life. The violent thrashing that had threatened to buck me off its prone body died down to twitching as I greedily bit, swallowed, and sucked on the wound I’d given the wolf. My vision cleared, and I could feel the bones in my forehead shifting as if pulling together and fusing.

My vision cleared the white and dark spots, retreating into nothingness, giving me a clear image of the mutilated body that lay underneath me, subtly twitching. The freezing cold numbness in my limbs had fully retreated by now giving way to sheer agony; the muscles in my legs and arms felt ripped apart and shredded, and looking at my hands through the tears in my coat sleeve revealed almost black purple bruises that covered my forearms, slowly shrinking and shifting in color, becoming milder as I ate the wolf’s body.

I had to take a break from the meal that was repairing my body as I dry retched hard, feeling like my lungs were on fire as something was forced up my airway; it felt like choking in reverse as congealed blood with fragments of sharp white bone were heaved from my mouth.

Finishing the massive wolf was a seriously taxing task. Even as my meal was constantly healing and refilling me with energy, just chewing the monstrosity and biting through it was such a rote and strenuous task that I was thankful to be free of it. On the plus side, I’d had my stocks nicely padded from the meal and unlocked a new genera, and just looking at how much my numbers had been inflated, this thing must have weighed 600 pounds or more.

The freezing sensation that had filled me earlier had retreated from my limbs, but I could still feel it somewhat. Deep in my chest between my heart and liver, I felt this freezing pit within me like a frosty hand left a permanent mark on my soul.

Pulling up my notifications and mutations page showed me something interesting—the name of what I had just eaten and that I’d gained two new mutation genera.

[Trait Eater: New Genus discovered ]

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

[Wulvhund slain, experience acquired]

“Let’s go home, and then we look over these mutations properly; I don’t want us getting fucked in the rear again.”

"Agreed,” I said while walking away, following my own tracks back to my hut. Re-entering my makeshift camp, I sat down on the floor beneath my grass roof and ran through my new mutations.

The most interesting mutation category: Legacy was completely empty; at least the common ranked mutations were, and I didn’t have access to anything higher for some reason.

I looked through the mutations list for the Fenraka genus and found frustratingly that it was almost identical to the Canis mutation list, save for a few things like

[Mana Luminance Night-Vision]

But none of the mutations I found on the Fenraka list reflected the monstrous abilities the Wulvhund demonstrated.

“They have to be locked behind that fucking uncommon mutations section, whatever’s powering these things, and probably the legacy mutations are somehow considered uncommon or greater by the system.”

“I’m inclined to agree, Viktor, but there has to be a logic to it of some kind... There has to be a reason why the system considers something uncommon and why you aren’t qualified to access it.”

I shoved aside my woes over how the system operates and pulled up the humans mutation tab and selected a few I’d had my eye on.

[Adrenal Vault – Common]

[This mutation will create a small bladder attached to your adrenal glands surrounded by muscle where large quantities of adrenaline will be stored. By tensing the muscle surrounding the adrenaline bladder, you can pump massive doses of adrenaline into your system.]

[Cost: 20 pounds of blood, 10 pounds of organ, 10 pounds of musculature]

[Dense Skeleton – Common]

[This mutation significantly increases the density of your skeleton, granting you increased strength and resistance to physical injury from impact trauma.]

[Cost: 180 pounds of bone, 27 pounds of musculature]

[Dense Musculature – Common]

[This mutation increases the density of your muscles, granting you significantly increased strength and increased resistance to physical injury with a minimal weight and size increase.]

[Cost: 200 pounds of musculature, 30 pounds of bone]

Staring at the set of mutations I had been wanting, a thought occurred to me as I stared at the costs.

Organ just sounds so unnatural; shouldn’t it be something like Viscera?

The moment the thought finished in my head, the system screen adjusted before me shifting the name in my stocks and on the cost table to be viscera instead of organ.

“Oh fuck me, I’m still short on the bone for the enhanced skeleton mutation.” I rolled my eyes in frustration and accepted the two mutations I could afford, along with one more to shore up a weakness my last fight had exposed—how terrible it felt to be suddenly disarmed, especially since the deer ran off with my knives still in its sides.

[Bone Claws – Common]

[This mutation alters your nail beds to grow extremely dense and sharp bone.]

[Cost: 20 pounds of bone, 10 pounds of musculature, 5 pounds of viscera.]

[Bone Claws – Common, Dense Musculature – Common, Adrenal Vault – Common. Acquired, please stand by; stocks are being drained.]

Stocks:

[Musculature: 188]

[Bone: 83]

[Blood: 36]

[Viscera: 89]

[Free Attribute points: 0]

[Skill Points: 1]

[Legacy Perk: 1]

My legs turned to jelly underneath me, and I fell to the floor, my arms failing to come up and catch me. Flames coursed under my skin as every fiber of muscle in my body liquefied, leaving me deflated and weak, unable to even twitch from the pain.

The nails that protected the soft, sensitive, and vulnerable bundle of nerves on my fingertips flaked and peeled away, falling out of my fingers as the growth beds in my fingers reshaped, and thick white bone formed at the edges of my nailbeds, growing out to meet in the middle and fuse together into several inch-long, sharp claws.

The rest of my mutations came in far slower and more agonizing. I felt every moment of inflamed, liquefied musculature being weaved into a dense structure of iron-like wires under my skin.

By the time I could stand again, night was coming fast, and I felt born again under the red light of a dying star.

My musculature was like metal under my pale skin; poking my forearms with the tips of my finger resulted in practically no give except the wrinkling of my skin, and one oddity I noticed was that my hands looked slightly bigger, my fingers were more muscular, and the tendons underneath my skin were thicker and visibly larger when I flexed my hands.

There was a new sensation in my stomach, like there was a muscle between my abdominals that I could flex, and I unthinkingly did curious to feel out my new body, the mysterious muscle constricted squeezing something in my gut.

Suddenly the world slowed to a crawl, and my breathing quickened as fire filled my veins and pure energy coursed through my blood. My eye began twitching as my jaw trembled and every muscle in my body flexed, my biceps inflated, and veins popped as the muscles in my forearms strained my skin like steel wires.

My chest, thighs, calves, and abs all inflated like plates of flesh armor rippling under my skin as every fiber of my being stressed itself and went into hypertension. An intense rage and need to kill something forced its way into my mind.

My altered sense of time suddenly fell away, and the world felt horrifyingly fast as if it were flying at me, and the fire in my blood turned cold, and I almost began retching from the intense whiplash.