Lucy sighed as Rikorlak spoke, gesturing freely with his nubs.

“Stop doing that with your membrane; if the guards see you acting different they’ll haul you off.”

He interrupted his description of what exactly working in Analytics for the God of Death involved, paused, then continued sans gestures.

It was actually quite interesting, but he was going to get them both killed if he wasn’t more careful. He sheepishly retracted the nubs he’d been gesturing with into his membrane.

Lucy still thought it might simplify things if he was hauled off by the guards, but she had no intention of being killed by association.

Especially when she was so close. In the day or so since Rikorlak had arrived, Lucy had kept mostly to herself and focused all her energy on Oxidizing, and most of the time that remained she spent searching for the correct enzyme to destroy the fungus inside her. Taking a sample of it with Gene Stealer had allowed her to analyze its genetic makeup, which might come in handy in the future if she wanted to incorporate any of it into her own, but she still had to experiment manually to find a way to stop its growth.

She knew she was getting close, and if nothing else her efforts had brought her up to 56/100 points spent towards her next evolution.

At least I’ll have plenty of random enzymes to mess around with when this is all done, I suppose.

With 25 points banked, she only need 19 more to have enough to Evolve.

It had been a grueling few days of Oxidization since she arrived, testing her concentration and willpower, but it felt good. It wasn’t the kind of life-or-death effort that fighting required, more like working hard all day to master a new concept or get something important done.

Now she was taking a short break, listening to Rikorlak and letting her mind relax a bit.

As silly as it seemed in such a serious situation, it felt good just to hear someone talk about their job, even if that job involved flow charts of souls and Powerpoint presentations on how to increase natural disasters without the mortals or other gods noticing.

As Rikorlak complained about a manager who “wouldn’t let go of his fins”, Lucy wondered if perhaps he came from an aquatic species.

Then he detailed the drudgery involved in responding to endless memos and the lack of even quasi-competent coworkers, and she found herself actually laughing.

Hell really is other people, I guess, she mused, as the water around her shook slightly.

Overall, it felt…good. Really good. She knew she shouldn’t let her guard down, and she still didn’t trust Rikorlak completely, but she couldn’t deny the pleasure of having a simple conversation with someone over the relatable struggles of daily life. She even forgot for a while about the fungus still spreading throughout her body, as she grew used to its cycle of draining her excess energy.

Until a low energy alert pulled her attention away from making her response to Rikorlak, and she opened up her status.

[Energy: 15/100]

What? Sure, I was feeling a bit tired earlier, but ever since I started chatting I’ve felt great.

After their brief talk yesterday, Lucy had left Rikorlak to his own devices while she got to work, and it wasn’t until she’d taken this break that she spoke to him again.

Lucy didn’t understand. Her physical sensation of being tired normally tracked with her energy status, but right now she really didn’t feel tired in the least.

In fact, she felt more energized than usual, even since she’d had the steady supply of sulfur to feed on. She felt jazzed and ready to go!

But when she looked around herself, she realized that she hadn’t actually moved from where she stood near the geyser in hours. Had she been talking to Rikorlak for so long?

Lucy willed her Awareness to tighten in, focusing it inwards on herself.

What she found there terrified her.

The fungus had grown. Not at the steady rate she’d grown accustomed to, but exponentially, to the point where her insides were almost more fungus than cytoplasm.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

It made her sick to look at, and even worse when she focused her Awareness further and could actually feel the fungus pressing up against her inner membrane walls.

How did I not notice that happening? she wondered frantically.

She had been so careful to keep an eye on the parasitic fungus until she could get rid of it, but then Rikorlak wandered over and they’d resumed their chat from yesterday, and now…

Just a few hours ago Lucy had thought she’d been making good progress on her enzyme experiment, and once that was taken care of she would finish getting her points in just a day or so.

She’d already been envisioning herself going toe-to-toe with the Bug-Man in her new form, whatever it was.

Apparently not, she thought, numb with shock and revulsion.

With an effort, she forced herself to look more closely at the fungus, to see what exactly it was doing and to see if there were any clues as to which enzyme could reverse its growth. If she needed to, she would spend her points freely until she found one that worked.

It spread in hair-thin filaments of orange and muddy brown, clustering on anything solid before spreading outwards into her cytoplasm, where Lucy could now feel a tiny sense of movement as the fungus sucked her dry from the inside, gorging itself as her own body withered around it.

Rikorlak continued to chat, oblivious to her growing horror. Then something clicked in Lucy’s mind, and she tested her hypothesis.

“Rikorlak, no talking,” she said suddenly, the stream of yellow molecules flowing out seemingly in slow motion.

On their way out of her body, the yellow communication molecules her body made as she spoke brushed up against strands of fungus, which promptly twitched in response as they released their own stream of molecules.

Now that she was paying attention for it, Lucy noticed the slight dulling of her senses that came as molecules released by the fungus bound to chemical receptors in her body, giving her a sense of calm energy that had nothing to do with what her body was actually experiencing.

The fungus is drugging us, making us feel calm and happily relaxed while it sucks us dry. But why now, and only when we communicate?

A dreadful thought struck her. Maybe the behavior of the fungus had changed because it had gotten all the energy it needed from her vigorous Oxidization, and now all it needed her to do was sit there nice and distracted while it took over her body completely.

“Hmm?” Rikorlak replied absently, cut off from his monologue but apparently happy enough to redirect to a new topic. “No, I suppose it’s not talking, is it? Not really.”

She tried to warn him again, but he was already talking, clearly distracted as he watched the stream of molecules flowing freely out of his own membrane, as so many had over the last few hours. “More like sign language, perhaps? Not quite…maybe it’s similar to—mmmph!”

Lucy held her newly formed appendage against the place in his membrane where Rikorlak’s communication molecules were coming out of, panicked into action at the intolerable image of the fungus spreading farther and farther.

“I mean don’t communicate! It makes the fungus grow mo—”

Then a shout came from a guard nearby, and Lucy cursed her rotten, stinking luck as a posse of spear and net-armed larvae stormed down the slope toward her, scattering microbes as they crashed through the field of geysers.

Lucy looked down at her appendage, furious at herself for making the same mistake she’d just warned Rikorlak about.

Fuck! Oh, come on! He must’ve made little arms a dozen times today, and the guards didn’t notice a thing!

Apparently Jade hadn’t been kidding when she’d told Lucy not to rely overmuch on luck.

Lucy quickly withdrew the appendage she had just formed to slap over Rikorlak’s membrane. It hadn’t actually cut off the flow of molecules, but it had startled him enough to make him stop talking.

It wasn’t a great trade-off, she figured, as the guards surrounded her and began to prod Rikorlak away. No doubt the guards worried she would infect him somehow with her strange mutation. For a moment the guards seemed confused when they got to her and she didn’t look any different, but apparently they decided to take her away just to be safe, presumably to the doctor for examination.

Lucy started to form a spike. She hadn’t heard buzzing yet, but the commotion would surely call down Bug-Man from the ceiling as soon as he heard something going on.

Lucy chastised herself as she got ready to go down fighting. This was what she got, she supposed, for trying to help a man who had been sent to retrieve her soul. What had she been thinking? It was the foolish kind of unthinking friendliness and trust that always got people betrayed on reality TV. She should have known better.

I always thought I’d be good at Survivor, not the chump who gets voted off first!

As the larvae closed in, though, Lucy forced herself to think the situation through.

The guards were getting ready to throw nets, but none of the spear-armed ones had made a move yet. Were they just going to tangle her in the net to make her easier to kill?

No, she reasoned. They had come over because they saw her reach out with an appendage, and taking mutated microbes to the doctor-larva was clearly their policy.

They took me to the doctor the first time, she reasoned. And they probably don’t know I’m the same microbe.

Bug-Man was probably smart enough to doubt the coincidence of two strangely-mutated microbes in as many days. But he still hadn’t appeared.

Maybe I’ve got some luck left after all.

The question was, what about the larvae? Would they notice she was the same microbe they’d been ordered to kill once already?

Then she thought of the bumbling doctor-larva, and that decided it for her. Even before she’d conked him on the head, he had seemed a little out-of-whack intellectually speaking, and presumably he was the smart one around here.

It took all her self-restraint not to struggle and fight back against the confinement, but the longer she fought and resisted, the more likely it was for Bug-Man to come and snip her in half without a word. When the time was right, she would fight.

At least this way, she had a chance.

Lucy pulled up her interface. She would wait until she was in the doctor’s alcove, then enact the upgrades she chose. If last time was any indication, she should have plenty of time before he got there to let the upgrades take place.

As guards dragged Rikorlak away, Lucy moved forward willingly, planning out her purchases she would need either to fight or to flee.