Apparently, the Goddess had some control over time, because Lucy found herself right back where she’d been a few minutes before she died.

[HP:10/10]

The big spiky monster’s maw gaped at the end of the tunnel, and at the sight of it she felt her membrane itching to fight and her cytoplasm tingling with resolve. She wanted that thing gone, and what’s more, she wanted its skill. The organism was clearly not very advanced, yet even it had the ability to hunt. Lucy was sure she herself had some way of metabolizing energy, but as far as fighting went…

Everything was genetic, or at least influenced by genes. Unless this big bad bacterium had gone to a piercing shop and had those spikes put in, she should be able to replicate the genetic code and use it to make them herself. Assuming she could provide the necessary energy for it.

She would worry about that later. For now, she had a slimy bad guy to kill.

She tried not to think about precisely how it would consume her if it got the chance. That mouth on its underside looked unpleasant to say the least.

The monster had stopped shooting its spikes, apparently realizing Lucy was trying to wait it out. That was unusually smart for an organism without any nervous system whatsoever, but Lucy would put on her microbiologist hat after she’d won the battle. Right now, she had fighting to do. Her promise to the Goddess burned like fire throughout her cell, and she felt energized and rested, despite her currently weak body.

She was ready.

Lucy rolled out of cover like a rogue wheel down the highway, gripping the stone with her membrane to pull her body along.

The spike monster was surprised by her sudden assault and let out its spike too quickly. It PING’d off the side of the tunnel and shattered. Lucy kept rolling.

She saw that she’d have to either take a shot point-blank or stop and try to dodge, but Lucy wasn’t stopping. She had finally gotten some small push of momentum, and she didn’t intend to lose it now. She barreled on.

When the shot came it came in low, aimed at her center mass.

With a surge of effort, Lucy coiled her body like a spring and jumped!

Well, it wasn’t much of a jump, but it was upward movement! And more importantly, it was enough for the spike to slide through the barest layer of her phospholipid membrane without causing any real damage.

When she reached the monster, she jumped again. It had turned its mouth away in order to fire spikes, and she saw her opening.

It was missing spikes on its front half from the ones it had been using as ammunition, and Lucy shook her head at the monster’s mistake. If it had used the spikes evenly from all over its body, Lucy wouldn’t have had a clear space to attack.

She slammed into the giant bacteria, activating her Gene Stealer skill at the same time.

Nothing happened.

As the monster writhed and rolled beneath her and she held on for dear life, Lucy tried again and again to activate her skill. It had been so easy to pull up her character sheet with her intention that she didn’t understand why it wasn’t working.

She thought fast. Clearly skills worked differently from pulling up information. Maybe it was something you had to practice until it was ingrained in your body, like muscle memory. But she had no time for that now. Even as she thought, her body slid on the monster’s oval form until a spike farther down on its body pierced her membrane. It felt like being stabbed in slow motion.

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Lucy felt panic begin to rise in her body like a black obscuring tide. It would drown out everything else if it had the chance. She couldn’t do this. She was a scientist, for Pete’s sake, not a warrior! The only thing she’d ever been stabbed with was a micro-pipette!

Something the Goddess had said came to her then in a flash.

To be challenged is to change, and change is life.

Lucy may not have been a warrior, but she was a scientist. And she understood then that struggling for her life was in a way no different from the skills she’d been practicing for years in the lab. In science you did your best to come up with an answer, but more times than not, you were wrong. Failure had been an integral part of Lucy’s daily life for years, and she was no stranger to the pain of it.

She understood now what she had to do. Intending to use the skill wasn’t enough. Her character sheet may have let her know it was an ability that was possible for her, but it couldn’t make her body do something. She had to figure out how the mechanism worked for herself, at least enough to get it started. She had to do it herself.

She reframed the pain she felt in her mind, accepting it as the cost of this experiment.

Lucy was limited by her lack of familiarity with her body, but at the end of the day it wasn’t exactly overly complicated. She was a one-celled organism interacting with another, and at this level everything came down to chemistry.

Lucy would have smiled with gritted teeth if she could. Chemistry was her bread and butter.

As the spiky monster thrashed below her, Lucy calmed her mind, envisioning her eyes closing and her breath evening out. To her surprise, her field of Awareness actually did dim, and she could feel something like breath in her body, a slow and steady movement of…something.

In and out. In and out. After a moment she realized what it was.

Lucy may not have breathed with nose and lungs, but her body was not closed off to the world around her. Her membrane kept her contained and distinct, but did not separate her completely.

That phospholipid bilayer was semi-permeable for a reason, after all.

Small, uncharged particles and gases diffused smoothly and passively through her membrane before equalizing within, maintaining the equilibrium of her cytoplasm and allowing her body to maintain itself.

She had a sense that more was possible, and knew that carrier proteins were ready and waiting to transport material into her cell which she could digest for energy. That would have to wait until after the battle though. For now, she focused on the small, thread-like strands floating around her cytoplasm. Her RNA.

It wasn’t easy to concentrate with one of the monster’s spikes impaling her, but it did help to anchor her body. Pain stabbed through her, and she reminded herself what it meant. It meant something was changing in her body, but she could use that to her advantage too.

She focused inwards and saw the monster’s spike. It had pierced her membrane to the hilt and now sat embedded in her liquid insides. She focused closer and saw…

There! A tiny hole in the very tip of the spike. It was nearly microscopic, probably the result of a chance mutation, an evolutionary precursor to a more advanced structure for feeding or fighting.

It was all the opportunity Lucy needed.

She concentrated on the flow of ions and particles in and out of her membrane, and with a strong effort of will she pushed everything closed. All the channels in her bilayer membrane slammed shut, and Lucy let out a sigh of relief as the pressure began to build. As soon as it did, she knew her plan would work. Or at least could work.

She wasn’t sure if it was because of her Reform Body skill or a gift from the Goddess, but Lucy had control over her body. She may not have been big, but she was master of her one-celled body. As long as she understood what was happening and it could physically be accomplished, it seemed, she could do it. Her limitations were energy and concentration.

The grip of her membrane on the monster’s slimy skin was slipping, and the spike inside her began to withdraw. With a grunt she forced her membrane channels open and started expelling cytoplasm, ejecting her own insides into the water around her. The negative pressure inside her body rose dramatically, and the monster’s own cytoplasm began to flow into her from the tip of the spike embedded in Lucy's guts.

Just a few more moments. Just a few more…

She tried not to think about the precious nutrients and energy she was basically puking into the water around her. She had to build up negative pressure inside her body.

A thin, thread-like strand snaked out of the spike impaling her and entered her cytoplasm, and Lucy’s enzymes attacked it. They tore and ripped until the monster’s RNA lay in scattered chunks. The chunks began to dissolve as proteins worked to break their bonds and absorb their energy, but Lucy had what she needed.

With a flash of insight, Lucy realized why she had the Gene Stealer skill. It wasn’t just assigned to her randomly or doled out by the Goddess, it was hers. She wasn’t sure about Reform Body and Protective Coating, but she had done her doctoral dissertation on horizontal gene transfer in bacteria, and the knowledge of how the process worked was embedded deep inside her. It was a part of her.

With a focus drilled in thousands of hours of precise lab-work and delicate experiments, Lucy plucked out the segment of RNA information she needed.