One measly EP?! I risked my life for this! And I didn’t even get to eat anything!

Lucy stared at the open Shop in front of her, her attention focused on the counter in the top right that tracked her available points.

Evolution Points: 1

After a bit more grumbling, Lucy closed the interface without spending the point. The only thing she could afford right now was the permeability upgrade to her channels, and she could always buy that if she found a better place to harvest sulfur. That seemed like it likely wouldn’t be a very time-sensitive operation, so she didn’t mind holding on to the point.

As she had the thought, Lucy wondered if she should invest in the permeability upgrade now and head back to the shaft of superheated water that had borne her upwards. But unless the upgrade tripled how much energy she got from sulfur, she would just be stuck there barely staying alive at best, and she had already come a long ways.

She stayed still in the water, the decision weighing on her. Head back and hope, or keep moving forward into the unknown?

It was a decision that once would have troubled her more, but now, the answer suddenly felt clear.

Her cilia brushed the water around her, sending her gently forward.

I guess I should start thinking about what to save up for, though.

The vacuole was her first choice. At 10 EP it wouldn’t be too long before she could afford it, and it would hopefully give a serious boost to how much matter she could store after making a kill, thereby increasing her energy stores substantially. Unless she found an area with more plentiful prey to hunt, storage seemed like her best option.

But for now, she still needed to actually hunt. She wouldn’t even have the chance to start storing up energy if her current stock ran out.

[Energy: 11/100]

That wasn’t great, considering that Lucy had done nothing more strenuous after fighting the single bacteriophage than float through empty tunnels for the last few hours. She had already covered more ground than she would have been able to without her cilia, so at least they were more efficient, not to mention nicer to use than wriggling.

That’s something, right? They say it’s important to appreciate the little things in life.

Lucy wasn’t sure if that advice still applied when you were slowly starving to death, but she was determined to stay positive. It did feel good to move faster, even if she wasn’t exactly darting around. The filaments that covered her body were undoubtedly an improvement.

But they were still a steady drain on her energy stores, and forming a Spike to use in combat would only drain her more rapidly. She could probably take out another couple bacteriophages, but what she really needed was something she could eat.

Even after the deadly haze of poisonous DNA had dispersed from the body of the first one she’d killed, the only parts left over had been hard, rigid structures that she didn’t seem able to make use of, no matter how much she plopped herself over them and willed their chemical energy into her body.

With the proper enzyme, Lucy thought she might have been able to do it, but as of now she had no method of concentrating the enzymes enough to work outside of her body, so even if she produced one that happened to work, she’d have to find a way to actually eat the hard bits first.

Lucy sighed, her membrane exchanging water with the area around her in a ripple. She didn’t even have a freaking mouth! Her cytoplasm rumbled.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

She would just have to hope that the next organism she came across would be one with tastier innards.

***

Lucy tried to put herself in the mind of a hunter. It was hard to feel like anything other than prey when your body consisted of a single cell, but she tried anyways, focusing on the feeling she’d had after her first fight.

Victory, she told herself. Glory. What did the Romans feel like when they conquered…Rome?

History was not Lucy’s strong spot.

Whatever. Just imagine what it will feel like when you—

Fuck!

A bacteriophage scuttled out of the darkness at her, so fast she barely had time to dodge out of the way. Luckily, her reaction time was decent, and her cilia gave her just enough of a quick response for her to hustle closer to the center of the tunnel.

Where she stayed, as something like three or four dozen of the deadly little spider-like organisms swarmed through the tunnel after the first, covering the walls, floor, and ceiling with their scuttling, clacking forms.

Lucy held her breath, maintaining her spot in the very center of the tunnel. She was just out of reach there, but if even a single of the bacteriophages decided to drop down from the ceiling or jump up at her from below, she would have nowhere to go.

She hadn’t actually been injected with their poisonous DNA yet, so it was possible it wouldn’t instantly kill her. But with fifty of the things swarming on all sides, Lucy didn’t like her chances even if each one only did half a point of damage.

Just as the terror of the situation was truly settling in, the swarm was gone. Before relief could settle on her, an unfortunate question arose in her mind. Had they been running from something?

Lucy looked around nervously, and noticed with a slight feeling of dread that the weird plant tendrils in the stone were starting to get thicker here, growing deep into the structure of the tunnel.

She continued on. Creepy environment or not, a cell needed to eat!

As Lucy floated down the tunnel, she began to feel a strange vibration in the water around her that only grew stronger as she swam. It felt constant: a droning hum that reminded her of being in a very quiet building with the AC running.

For a moment she had the absurd image stuck in her head of a hydrothermal vent with a window-unit on the side. Then she rounded a corner of the tunnel, and saw what was making the noise.

Or who, rather.

In the middle of the tunnel in front of her was a figure that would have vaguely resembled a human, if it hadn’t been formed of plated stone slabs. And if it hadn’t had a pair of diaphanous wings buzzing away behind its back, creating that humming noise.

Lucy got a good look at the creature, as it didn’t seem to notice her yet. Its pincer-like hands were clasped behind its ridged back, and it leaned forward as if to study one of the plant tendrils on the wall.

Too startled to move, Lucy just stared.

The wings were long and rounded, doubled like those of a dragonfly and shot through with white vein-like structures. Its body was harsh and angular, thin around the waist and not much thicker anywhere else. The only color Lucy could see was grey, though she wasn’t sure if that was entirely accurate, or if her Awareness didn’t show other colors well. So far, all the organisms she’d come across had been rather drab.

It looked, overall, like an artist’s very creative interpretation of a question no one had asked: what would a stick-bug, a fly, and a human look like if you mashed them into one?

Lucy found the result vaguely queasy to look at, and decided she would let this mystery stay right where it was. With the barest, most focused application of her attention, she willed her cilia to push her back the way she’d come.

Gently…gently…

Despite a surge of curiosity at the strange creature, Lucy’s caution had won out. She had barely survived a fight with a spiky blob; she wasn’t about to go tangling with strange bug-humanoids on her second day in the—

The buzzing hum noise suddenly stopped, and the creature's head snapped around, and within its angular, plated head Lucy saw the most beautiful eyes she’d ever imagined.

They were bug eyes, so still a bit creepy looking, sure. But the colors…

Faceted like a jewel cut with a thousand faces, each eye shone in wild prismatics of color, each facet a subtly different hue in every shade of the rainbow, and all shifting like the current of the waves.

Lucy saw colors she had no name for, from the murky sludge of rotten wood to the shining vibrance of a red so pure it seemed to glow from within.

Guess I can see colors, she thought numbly. It felt a bit like seeing the sun after days spent in the dark.

After she got over the shock of the eyes, she realized that what she’d taken for the movement of wings was actually a bubble of air that surrounded the creature in a sphere.

The wings blurred and the buzzing resumed as it turned to face her and started moving forwards, and for a moment all Lucy could process was that it was flying, underwater. In a bubble of air.

That seems…inefficient, to say the least. Actually, it was—

“Impossible,” she heard a droning voice say.