Okay, Lucy thought, after fighting her way through a few straggling guards and making it up the slope to the edge of the pit. That wasn’t so bad.
She looked around when she cleared the edge, expecting to see swarms of more guard-larvae coming her way, or whatever had made the evil sounding laugh from before.
Instead, she saw nothing. Only empty plains of tendril-covered stone.
Still mostly concerned about the Bug-Man showing up from above, Lucy wondered where exactly all the guards had gone off to, but didn’t question her luck. The parasitic fungus inside her was still growing, and she needed to find a safe place where she could deal with it. With 57 points spent and 19 available, she was getting close to the hundred she needed to evolve.
She had expected to gain enough fighting her way out, but if they were going to leave her free to waltz off, she wasn’t going to say no!
She waved to Rikorlak to point the way forward. The skill she’d stolen from the doctor larva had slotted into her Reform Body skill as an upgrade rather than becoming its own skill, and she clenched the spike firmly in her newly-pronged hand, which gave her much better stability and control than her previous grip.
Just as they were passing the doctor’s alcove and Lucy was starting to get a truly bad feeling about the silence and solitude, she heard the nose again. A guttural, burbling sound that shook the water around her.
It seemed to be coming from the alcove, and Lucy knew enough about horror movies not to go check it out. Rikorlak had stopped in confusion at hearing the noise, and she waved her spike at him as she started to move.
I will happily leave you behind, my new pseudo-friend. If you want to go investigate that disturbing noise, I shall float away with a clean conscience and an intact membrane.
She began to do just that, but as she turned she saw movement out of the corner of her Awareness. The membrane-silk partition that had once closed off the doorway lay tattered on the ground, ripped to shreds. And the stone…
Oh, the stone is crumbling. That’s probably a sign of something good and friendly in the alcove, right?
Lucy finished turning around and got ready to bolt.
It hadn’t looked like particularly brittle stone when she’d been in that room before, and she had no desire to tango with anything that could rip it apart like that. As the first flecks then chunks of stone began to fall from the doorway, Lucy got a glimpse of pale, bloated flesh.
With a roar, the creature knocked loose a large section of stone, nearly freeing itself. Behind it, she saw the mangled corpses of microbes and guard-larvae alike before dust clouded the water.
At first, Lucy didn’t recognize him, since the densely-wrinkled skin had stretched so taut as to look like an overfilled, elongated balloon, and the blank expanse it had instead of eyes had been completely taken over by its mouth, which now stretched widely in another incoherent, gargling roar.
Then she saw an appendage almost identical to her own reaching through the dust, and there could be no doubt.
The doctor had returned.
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Slivius railed against the walls of his prison.
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It had once been a place of research, he knew, in some dim part of his mind. But that was in the past. Once he had gloried in such things as memory and knowledge of the past.
But now that he had evolved, he saw them for the burden they were. What had ever come of all that navel-gazing, after all? A meal that took ages to grow?
No.
His was a path towards power, and while insight and intellect were a part of that path, cunning alone would not take him as far as he knew he could go.
For that, he had needed strength. Raw, invigorating, life-taking strength.
As ever, the heavens had provided for him. In his moment of change he had seen other possible paths laid out before him:
An avenue shaded by wide, bristling plants that could drip their delicious, noxious toxins through his flesh.
A tunnel to hide in and be safe, carved out of the stone by the work of his own claws.
A hallway of a sort he had never seen, with bright lights at regular intervals above and polished stone below his walking feet.
That one in particular had appealed. Slivius was done living in the dark. But the strange spherical lights were so artificial, so unlike the fierce, fiery glow of the last option.
In that vision, he had been the source of light. Standing proudly in an open space—truly open, not like these little cracks!—he had blazed with power. Burned with it.
Yes, Slivius was done living in the dark. And until he could reach his true form, his strength would be a source of light for those to come, a beacon illuminating the way for those who would follow behind him.
With a pleasant, straining effort, he lifted his primary arm once more. The appendage had bulged and swollen like the rest of his body, and at the end of it was his new “hand.”
It was a glory. A prodigious feat of biological supremacy he could never have imagined before. Where once had extended two feeble prongs, a plethora of tentacles now writhed and grasped, eager to feed the toothy maw that had grown at its center.
As the razor-tipped tentacles dug into the cracks in the stone, one of his dozen-or-so secondary appendages brought the remains of a corpse up to his facial mouth and shoved in the remains of an unfortunate guard.
He glared at the offending appendage, disgusted by its inferiority. To have that puny thing attached to his body!
At the thought, another identical appendage grabbed the first and began trying to tear it off his body. With an effort, Slivius calmed both and returned to his task, pounding and prying at the stone doorway that blocked his way.
Before long, he was free.
Two strange looking microbes stood some distance away, but he had no concern for them. With his new tentacle-tipped arm held out in front of him and tasting the way, Slivius scuttled on his dozen lesser appendages as fast as the feeble things would drag him.
He could smell the herd, and found that his appetite was not yet quite sated.
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Fuck.
Lucy was not pleased at the reappearance of the doctor larva. At first she’d assumed some monstrous creature had replaced him, but then she’d heard the familiar sound of his mad chortling, and known the mutated creature was the same.
He moved directly for the herd. Or tried to, at least. The dozen arm-like appendages currently dragging him along the ground were awkward and uncoordinated, each acting seemingly of its own will and only occasionally all working together to accomplish the goal of forward motion. The end result was a shambling, irregular gait that only slowly brought him towards his goal.
Once he reached the herd, though, Lucy had little doubt that the tentacles that had torn apart the stone would make quick work of the microbes there.
I knew I should have killed this guy!
Lucy hadn’t known that at the time, and she didn’t intend to start going around slaying anything and anyone who could conceivably be a threat in the future—she eyed Rikorlak—but it still didn’t feel great to have what she’d thought was a clever calculation come back to bite her in the ass. She had tried to be merciful, for Pete’s sake!
I will not let this be my villain arc, she told herself. I won’t.
As the doctor monstrosity shambled toward the herd, Lucy swam quickly over to the alcove, putting off the decision of whether or not she would fight him as she checked for any surviving microbes.
There weren’t any. Only a scene of torn flesh and horror. She felt her metabolism quicken and her mind go blank at the sight of the carnage, even moreso than at the sight of the doctor.
Holding back her bile, she turned to leave. As she did, she saw a familiar sword-like shape embedded in the body of a guard.
Lucy looked between the bladed cane and the spike she currently held, then reluctantly formed another appendage and picked it up, sliding the razor edge free with a slick rasp and closing her pronged hand around its base.
Remembering the red-membraned microbe huddling feebly beneath the others and waiting quietly to die, Lucy made her decision and turned to fight the creature the doctor had become.