The water around Lucy was warm.

Formless as it flowed around her, it parted against her membrane and bent her cilia like long grass under the wind.

There was a current here, outside the cave. She had felt it before, on her journey to this place, but now she questioned where exactly it was coming from, and where it was going.

The pull of it was steady and straight, like some draining vortex leagues away was sucking all the water towards itself, hungry for anything it could pull into its hungry jaws.

It was warm. Not hot, like the blasts that had risen from the chasm, and not cold, like the tunnels behind her.

Just warm, she thought, as her cilia filtered nutrients from the water into her body without a thought. Like swimming in soup.

Wait, no. That’s disgusting.

She floated halfway out of the entrance to the cave, looking out into the small half-sphere that she could see in front of her. If she focused, she could just make out shadows of movement behind her, where Rikorlak and Sam were beginning to stir in the main chamber of the cave.

But, for now, she was interested in what lay ahead. What lay beyond her.

It’s so small, she thought, thinking about the sphere of dim illumination provided by her Awareness.

It had grown with her first Evolution, but that seemed hardly to matter, here where the water opened up before her and vast plains of stone stretched below.

Her cave was high enough up the cliff face that she could only just make out the ground below, and only for a short distance before it faded into the murky blackness that hid the rest of her surroundings from her.

Memories came unbidden to her mind, and the close, black horizon all around her felt suddenly threatening. Like anything could emerge from the darkness in a moment, hurtling at her faster than she would be able to react.

Lucy’s body tensed as more memories flooded through her, of searing pain and parts of her body separated and pulled away by the current.

She edged farther back into the cave entrance. It was safer there in the stone, where the solid structure limited the angles an attack might come from.

Lucy told herself it was good that she was learning to develop instincts for these things, even as fear gripped her mind and squeezed her heart. She backed further into the cave.

When she returned to the main chamber, she saw that the others were, in fact, still asleep. Rikorlak’s fin swished gently every now and then to keep his position stable, while Sam bobbed lower to the ground.

Lucy eyed the defensive blockages. All were still intact, which was good. She had woken from her sleep at some point earlier, sure that one of the shovel-handed creatures was tearing its way through one of them. But there had been nothing, just a fading vibration that might have echoed out of her dreams.

She would go through her System today, she decided. It was a task that needed to be done, and hunting would wait until she had a plan.

First, she pulled up the upgrade interface, which showed her the current state and status of her body in a three-dimensional model. Her metabolic functions all seemed to be running smoothly, and her health and energy were full.

Her fungal symbiote appeared as a kind of glowing yellow overlay on the model of her body, strands of thin, interconnecting lines concentrated in her membrane and growing outwards, where they widened and became indistinguishable from her cilia. They were longer than her old cilia, and thicker besides.

The model had nodes on it at certain points, showing her possible upgrades. There were more of them now, letting her know she could upgrade various aspects of her body, reinforcing here or increasing efficiency there.

From that display, Lucy clicked on the Shop. It was filled with many of the same organelles as before, though some had changed slightly. For example, the cytoskeleton option had been replaced with microtubules made up of stiffened fungal hyphae, which would allow for transport between various parts of her body in addition to providing structural support.

Others were entirely new.

Fungal Web - 50 EP: Ever thought it was weird that Spiderman didn’t suck his victims dry like a real spider? Tired of having to process food internally? Who needs a stomach when you can have a deadly fungus do the work? Outsource your digestion today!

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Spores - 3 EP per dozen: Want to plant a garden, but can’t because the hydrothermal vent you call a home doesn’t get good light?

Arm of Slivius - 30 EP: Guess he won’t be needing this anymore! Did you notice the gaping mouth at the center of the tentacles? Pretty scary, huh?

Lucy was surprised at this last option, and wondered why exactly the Shop was offering it to her, when, as far as she knew, she could add it to her genome herself since she had taken it with Gene Stealer.

She supposed there could be compatibility or resource constraints, but—

Manual insertion of genetic information via Gene Stealer is still possible, but purchasing the item from the store and letting professionals handle the installation reduces the risk of mutation or insertion error pretty close to zero.

We did mention the risk of mutation and insertion error before, didn't we? …No? Well, think of this option as a helpful set of training wheels. Children have to pay for training wheels, right?

That was interesting, she supposed, though she didn’t plan to pay for anything she could get herself for free.

Lucy saw other body parts as well, including suction-feet and a beak from the scavenger she’d killed days ago. She hadn’t thought to take anything from it at the time, but apparently her System had stored the information somewhere for her.

Well…thank you, System. Even if you are kind of a dick.

Her System made no reply, and Lucy moved on to the final thing she wanted to examine: her RNA.

In the strands of genetic information that catalogued her skills, she was surprised to find something new: a subsection that grouped together the enzymes it was possible for her to produce.

Unfortunately, the grouping didn’t seem to actually organize the enzymes, and Lucy already had the ability to produce a few different kinds, so it was a bit of a mess.

It did, however, keep a blueprint for each enzyme like it did for her other skills, showing her the chemical structure of how each of them worked, and what they were effective against.

That part seemed to be limited to uses she had actually encountered so far, but it was nice to have a catalogue of them to refer back to.

Then she navigated to the skill she’d been looking for, Protective Barrier.

The diagram still showed some sort of glowing green molecules forming a protective shell around her body, but Lucy could make neither head nor tails of how it was supposed to work.

Is it magic? she wondered.

The protective shell didn’t seem to be connected to her body in the diagram, so it sure looked like magic. But try as she might, Lucy could correlate nothing in her body to the little green molecules, and eventually, she set it aside.

For now.

After looking through all the new options and upgrades available to her, Lucy floated still and Oxidized for a while as her thoughts came together, the steady flow of energizing molecules and low buzz of rushing energy focusing her mind.

Without knowing more about the specific enemies she would be facing, it was hard to say, but her instinct was to use Gene Stealer to grow the Arm of Slivius, then save up for the Fungal Web.

It was a bit of an investment, especially without knowing more about how it worked. It might prove too slow to use as a combat tool, for example, especially if she had to stay tethered to the web the whole time.

But even if she couldn’t use it for combat, it should help her make use of the bodies of organisms she killed, rather than just taking in their cytoplasm. From the way it had worked so far, Lucy suspected that would increase her yield of Evolution Points as well. It also appealed to her as a potential ranged option, if she would be able to set it up on a target and swim away while it did its work.

In any case, she didn’t need to decide about the Fungal Web now.

Time for a new weapon, she thought, eagerly activating Gene Stealer and directing its proteins to select the proper sequence.

A new display came up before her, showing a model of her body with the tentacled arm attached and flashing a warning.

Unfortunately, Gene Stealer seemed to insert the genes as is, with no modifications. For her spike and upgraded hands, that had been no problem, but with this…

In the model, the arm remained the same size it had been on the doctor, making Lucy look more like an overgrown arm with a small microbe attached than the other way around.

Oh. I mean, I could, but…

As Lucy hesitated, the display showed model-Lucy struggling to move forwards with her flagellum, then pitching over in a heap.

A helpful notification came up, letting her know that items purchased from the Shop would always be tailored to her size and metabolism, no adjustments needed.

Lucy checked her available EP and saw that she had 12.

Well, she sighed, that’s disappointing.

As strong as the massive arm looked, it seemed like it would be completely unwieldy on her current body.

One day, she decided. Or sooner, if I can find a way to tinker with the code and make it smaller. Until then, my plan is the same.

As the others began to wake from their long and peaceful sleep, Lucy prepared to hunt.

Checking in with her internal state, she confirmed once more that her health and energy were full, and that her fungal vacuole was ready to pump out its payload of destructive enzymes.

With a quiet stream of molecules she told Sam and Rikorlak where she was going, and when she should be back.

Rikorlak mumbled a response, and Lucy was tempted to ask one of them to come watch her back. That had been the whole point of being in a group, after all.

But as she neared the entrance of the cave and once more felt the current tugging gently at her cilia, she decided that this time, at least, she would go alone. The silence hung heavy in the water once more, and she let it close around her like a curtain, smooth and undisturbed.

The sphere of illumination provided by her Awareness was small, a tiny bubble of near-light intruding on the expanse of dark sea and stone around her.

But for now, it was enough.

And in time, it would grow.

With a jagged spike in one hand and the other free and ready, Lucy pushed off the stone with her flagellum, and swam out into the current.