Drums approached.
The beating, rhythmic chorus of their presence alerts the undead slumbering within. It begins to wake, roused from the stillness of its transformation as a gnawing hunger grows steadily in its mind. Hunger that rapidly consumes each and every one of its thoughts, leaving behind only a single, distilled truth:
Its prey is close.
This, the undead knows. It can feel its prey approaching. Feel it as surely as it feels the thrum of animating mana inside the very marrow of its bones. It can feel the tantalizing blood being moved back and forth by the approaching drums as it pulses in steady, delectable patterns. Patterns that draw closer with every pump, with every beat, and with every step. Patterns that, for the undead, etch their flow like crimson sigils into its mind that beg for freedom. For release. To be ripped free of their squallid prisons and used to slake its endless, harrowing thirst.
There is but one problem.
There are many beats to track. Too many. Too many pounding rhythms the undead both can, and cannot, understand. Its senses stretch further now, and they are more accurate than ever – but such details are still new to it and each one arrests the undead’s attention. Its pristine-white skull creaks not a sound as it swivels to face each of them in turn. It strains its newfound senses, and what it finds thrills the undead beyond the simple concerns of numbers.
The beats are calming down. Its prey does not sense the danger of its presence, and so they are foolish enough to continue forward. Encroaching upon the place where it had sought shelter. Where it had chosen to rest.
Encroaching upon its domain.
The undead waits, eager to teach a final lesson to these trespassers. Eager to consume them.
Such thoughts do not drive it to haste, however. It must be cautious here, else its meal may retreat. All predators know prey will never walk willingly into an open maw. Not one that can be seen, anyway. So, its location must be kept secret. Kept safe… and kept silent.
The undead found this an easy task. Its presence was currently masked from vision by thick wood and from scent by the hanging, festering cloud of leftover filth in this place. It could not smell such things, but its instincts recognized the presence of so many droppings and knew what that meant: it was hidden, at least for now.
All it needed to do was remain still… and wait. A skill its kind had mastered long ago.
Soon, the pulsing chorus of the drums grew too loud to ignore. Too close to resist – and the undead felt an opportunity present itself. Reaching for the door, it summoned its closest ally to hand – the latest addition to its burgeoning power. Flinging the door wide, it wasted no time in attacking.
Surprise may be the greatest currency a hunter could hope for, but it is still one that must be spent quickly. This, too, the undead knows as surely as the rising of the moon.
It charges forward, and the drums quicken. Its ally strikes.
One beat falls from the chorus. The rest flee.
The undead feasts.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Sean woke like he was coming up for air inside his own mind. Only it felt less like waking, and more like he had stepped from one nightmare into the next. Blood covered every inch of his formerly pristine body, raw meat gushed any number of fluids at him from all sides, and he was stuck more firmly into one place than he had ever been. At first, he thought his already-open jaw had been his subconscious mind gasping for breath – some lingering vestige of his humanity trying to claw its way to the surface – but the truth was far more unsettling.
His jaw was open, because his left hand – the only quasi-free upper appendage he currently had – was busy shoveling chunks of still-moving intestines into his maw as fast as it could manage. It took only a second of focused attention to stop the bone-shovel his fingers were acting as, and it was at precisely that point when the missing sequences of Sean’s memory began to return to him.
He wasn’t trapped in some nightmare hellscape of blood and torment, he was merely stuck head-and-chest-first inside the carcass of whatever creature he had just carved open.
Head-first, and all the way to my feet. Sean noted with considerably more calm than he had any right to have in this situation. How the hell did I manage this?
As if waiting for that very question, memories of the entire scene came rushing back. They poured over him in a cascade, and Sean found himself watching the aftermath of their evolution as if someone had slipped a VR helmet over his head and jammed the fast forward button up to 100x. He could see, hear, and feel everything that had happened in an instant. Like a movie that had been shot through the lens of his own orbs.
He had awoken atop the rotting filth that barely counted as flooring in the outhouse, having somehow collapsed at some point in the evolutionary process. Instead of exiting the shack however, Sean had merely gotten silently to his feet and stood there. Poised, and alert. His head and neck arcing from one direction to the next, his attention sharpening on various places along the wood.
No, not at the wood. Sean corrected himself internally, and the thought felt more instinctual than conscious. At the prey on the other side.
Only Sean’s rapt attention on the swirling networks of red, pulsing veins that he could now ‘see’ through his improved senses beyond the door kept him from focusing on why one of those words had resonated so strongly in his mind. There had to be at least a dozen of them, and each one was more enthralling than the last. Floating masses of blood-filled veins that mapped the outlines of large, four-legged creatures as they approached.
It was strange seeing such things overlap his normal vision, but Sean found he could discern the relative distance of each set of veins as well – at least to some degree. The transparency of blood flow, the echoing thrum of each beat, and the entrancing glow of the connected hearts sitting at the very center of each all spoke to the calculations at play, and Sean didn’t question how the math worked. His new instincts knew, and that was all that mattered.
Several minutes passed, and Sean had simply waited as the creatures approached. Once all of the beating hearts had been examined at least once, he had gone perfectly motionless. A statue chained to the floor might have moved more frequently, and his vision of the heavily scratched doorway – and the captivating crimson patterns beyond – budged not an inch.
At least, not until Sean had sensed one of the patterns approach within rushing distance.
Then, the world had moved so quickly it felt like Sean had to mentally replay the replay just to catch up. Mostly because the first thing he had done, he hadn’t actually seen. He had activated Gel somehow – or maybe Gel had activated himself – and Sean had distinctly felt half of the slime’s mass depart from the gelatinous core in his chest. That half had silently shifted as it slid down into his right hand, forming a large, clear battle-axe whose hilt extended out of his grip as naturally as if it had been built to be there. Barely an instant later, liquid from that same hilt had slithered through and around the bones of his entire hand before solidifying, creating a grip that Sean knew couldn’t be dislodged. At least, not without detaching his own skeletal arm.
A skeletal arm that was now, quite obviously, fully healed.
Sean’s elation that evolution apparently came with a free dose of healing was temporarily tabled as he felt his body both throw open the door and leap out of it at the same time. His instincts had used excessive force with both actions, intending to use the bang of the slamming door and the sudden rush forward to shock his targets in those first crucial seconds, but it appeared that tactic hadn’t worked.
His ‘targets’ didn’t move or dodge as Sean rushed towards them, which was all according to plan. The expressions on their faces were not ones of slack-jawed surprise, however. Their gazes and attention honed in on him , and Sean could tell they had been fazed not at all by his antics.
A herd of wild deer stared back at him, and not a one of them could have been less than several hundred pounds. Bristling horns covered the head of the largest buck in wide, arcing patterns that resembled thick briar patches, and its height was nearly enough to look Sean dead in the orbs. A pair of powerful shoulders marked by rippling muscles made the creature look like it lived inside a gym instead of the forest, and it grunted a challenge at him. The sound was a low, threatening rumble that Sean recognized from a Discovery channel special. It was the sound deer made right before a fight.
But it was also where the creature’s resemblance to the deer Sean had known back on earth stopped completely.
Rippling spines of hardened bone jutted out all along the creature’s spine, increasing in height as towards the end until they reached nearly half a foot off the base of its fluffy tail. A fluffy tail that was itself marked by needle-like spines pointing in a dozen directions. Thick bone plating extending halfway towards each knee covered its brutish cloven hooves, all of which were covered in old scars. Its dense fur was matted with gore and chips of bone, and as it bared thickset silver teeth at him Sean knew without being told that this particular member of the herd, at the very least, considered him a meal.
Oh my god. Sean thought, watching the memory in abject fascination as the massive antlered creature began pawing the ground in preparation to fight the creature coming for it – to fight him.
It’s a dire deer!
There was no other explanation, and though no prompt had officially named it, Sean internally bestowed this title on the creature. “Dire” was a classification many older games had assigned to monsters that were essentially just nastier versions of the animals they were based on. The classification was often something of a joke for players, who generally treated them as little more than entertaining exp fodder seeing as the creatures weren’t real monsters – and thus, not a threat.
This dire buck was clearly a real threat, and its response to his charge proved it. The beast caught Sean’s axe blow on its suddenly glowing antlers and that simple swing of its head alone completely halted his forward momentum. It heaved with all its might, and the dire buck’s strength was such that the motion completely took Sean’s feet out from under him. He was flung harshly into his opponent’s massive, partially plated side with enough force to crack bones less sturdy than his own. Sean began to scramble free but the herd leader was undaunted by his survival. In response, the dire buck simply swung him in the other direction, clearly intending to just bash its undead opponent into harmless pieces against its own hide.
Tangled as he now was in the bramble patch on its head, Sean was flung once again.
When the herd leader tried to swing him a third time however, it faltered and he was able to keep his ground. One of the dire buck’s front legs buckled forward, and the other only barely managed to stay shakily upright. Blood sprayed across the ground as the creature’s neck suddenly toppled forward, its thick muscles no longer able to contract as they had just moments before.
The dire buck’s herd, each nearly the same size, shape, and as aggressively decorated in bone plating as their leader, screamed a shrill, rebellious chorus at the night sky… and then bolted.
Bolted, because Sean hadn’t just been swinging along helplessly each time. Or at least, Gel hadn’t been. The slime had done something mid-swing. Transformed into a new weapon. Sean’s view of the situation hadn’t been sufficient to tell what the slime had turned into, but he had felt Gel change – and had known instinctually what to do: hack at the vulnerable veins of the crimson network he could sense pulsing just below the creature’s skin.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
The blow had been a lucky one, even guided by his newly improved senses, but that single swing of his own had been enough to end their battle. Turns out living creatures didn’t respond well to having their neck hewn almost completely off. Who knew?
Sean had stumbled for a moment, arterial spray from the dire buck’s neck continuing to paint the grass as its body twitched and waivered on feet that hadn’t realized it was dead yet. The sensation of a much shorter blade in his left hand answered his unasked question about Gel’s transformation, and Sean was just hoping to get a look at it when everything went wrong.
His right arm, still tangled in the dire buck’s bramble-like antlers, suddenly lurched to the side as the creature fell. The herd leader’s collapse was so sudden, and its weight so immense, that Sean actually hit the ground before it did – only for the beast’s plated body to smash down on his right arm. The impact felt like that of a collapsing boulder, and dull pain ran through Sean’s mind.
A series of excessively loud cracks echoed through the clearing, and Sean lost himself for a time in the same mental fog that always seemed to follow an attack. His body scrambled for purchase, for a grip, for an escape… and, failing to find any of that, Sean had simply begun to feed upon his fallen foe. Its size was too immense to consume all at once, even with the help of his gelatinous companion, so the coldly rational logic of his wounded mind had decided upon another course.
Boring straight through the corpse’s shoulder and out towards the other end.
That was where the memory ended. Where Sean found himself once more as the world came back to him. Waist-deep inside the carcass of a dire deer, where he had been using his one remaining hand to dig into, twist, pull, and then shovel fresh meat and organs directly into his mouth.
A mouth that led not to a stomach, but to an even more gluttonous entity.
“Mmhhphh. Mmph. Ohm. Oh yes, that’s the stuff.” The even more gluttonous entity in question mumbled into Sean’s thoughts, its voice like that of a happy child whose mouth was stuffed cheek-to-cheek with thick, juicy steak. “So much flavor! Mmph– Who knew fur could taste this good?!”
“What in the–” The newly evolved slime warrior began, before its ‘stomach’ interrupted him.
“Sean, are you tasting any of this? Please tell me you know what I’m talking about right now. Tell me you’re enjoying our first feast as the freshly evolved, here! Also, do you mind throwing some more down the hatch here? I’m just about down with the last –” Gel belched audibly in his mind. “-- handful and not being able to ooze around all this meat on my own is torture.”
There were many questions Sean had as he complied with his friends request, clawing out another section of the dire deer and its mystery-entrails to shove down his maw, but foremost among them was:
“How–did you just think a burp at me? Actually, you know what? Nevermind. I don’t want to know. What I do want to know is, what the hell just happened to us back there? Did you go all ‘dream-sequence’ there, too?” Sean could feel how his undead nature had been regulating his emotions throughout this whole situation, keeping him calm, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t curious.
“Dream-sequence?” Gel asked, curiously.
Sean took a brief second to order his thoughts, then explained what had happened from his perspective.
“After we evolved? That wasn’t me. I was asleep up here.” Sean waggled his skull to indicate his mind. “Mostly, anyway, and just now I–I watched myself move. I watched us kill this thing. I watched us devour it from the outside in hand-over-fist, and now we’re stuck literally half-way through this giant corpse.”
Sean gulped down another chunk of raw organ flesh, the act almost as reassuring as sucking down a cool breath of air had been back when he was alive. He was about to start speaking again when Gel spoke up, the slime’s voice still muffled as if he were trying to talk around overly large bites.
“I know, isn’t this fantastic?! All this food! Mmhph. Slimes don’t really dream like other creatures do, but if this is what dreams are like then I want more of them!” Gel crowed. “We should evolve all the time. More power, a great show, and a meal we didn’t even have to work for? It’s like… well, actually I have no real reference for what this is like, but it feels like a dream come true!”
“Going to take that as a: ‘you don’t actually know what happened’, then.” Sean said dryly, amused at his friend’s undaunted optimism. “Because I sure as hell don’t.”
“Nope!” Gel responded cheerfully. “Instincts just kinda took over, I guess.”
The slime didn’t seem the least bit perturbed by that idea, and honestly, Gel’s ready acceptance cooled Sean’s own concern over the situation even further. Losing control over himself had been considerably disturbing, but it hadn’t lasted that long and it wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before. Plus, now that he knew what was going to happen, he could prepare for it in the future.
Yep. Just rationalize all of this away. Sean decided. That’s the healthy way to do it.
His senses didn’t pick any more floating networks of veins, nor could he hear any distinctive beating hearts, so it looked like the rest of the dire deer really had bolted off into the woods. Sean wasn’t sure if they were going to come back – did deer have any desire for revenge? – but given that he was still carving his way through their former leader he felt it was a pretty safe bet that they would be left alone for a while.
Waking up half-submerged-in-a-carcass was honestly the most disturbing part of this whole thing. But those reactions were remnants of who he had been. His new self found nothing at all wrong with his current situation, and apart from having only one hand to shovel more food in with, his inner self was rather content with how the day was going. Sean felt content radiating through his very bones. He was proud of the kill, and why shouldn’t he be? The damned thing had been huge.
Besides, it had gotten what was coming to it. For encroaching on his domain.
Sean frowned, and shook his head to clear the strange resonance of that word from his mind. No matter what his new instincts wanted, he would not be considering a freaking outhouse part of his domain. Whatever part of the undead drove them to claim territory, Sean would die redead himself before he started trying to found an empire on bathrooms of all things.
Wiggling around as they clawed their way through the corpse towards freedom, Sean quietly reflected upon this new adjustment to his life. He had started in this world surrounded by dead bodies, it seemed oddly fitting that his evolution would have a similar beginning.
At least this corpse is fresh.
“Oh, and you didn’t answer my question.” Gel asked, genuine curiosity entering the slime’s voice as he gorged upon their kill. “Can you taste things now? I’ve never seen you eat before, but you’re really going whole hog on this thing!”
“Or is it ‘whole skeleton’?” Gel’s voice grew speculative. “‘Whole warrior’? What do you want me to call you now, anyway? You still look like a skeleton, just… bigger. ”
“Sean is still fine.” Sean responded, elbowing his way through what he thought was the creature’s thigh bones. “And no, I still can’t taste anything. Evolution fixed my arm though.”
Sean adjusted a bit more to get a look at the limb in question, remembering what had happened earlier. What he saw made his proverbial stomach drop. The bones were still attached, at least through whatever magical means kept the rest of his body animated, but the entire arm was all but shattered. He could sense no feeling at all from anything just below the shoulder. He remembered the snapping sounds from just before the memory had ended, and it was hard not to feel an irrational anger towards the former herd leader.
The damn deer had fallen on his arm! It’s stupid shoulder plates had snapped his own… shoulder… plates!
Asshole! Sean thought at it, scooping another helping of the dire deer’s innards into his mouth and chewing harshly on them out of pure spite. Just had to get the last shot in… and right after I’d gotten that arm back.
Bah. I hope you are delicious. Sean swallowed, then silently promised. Because when I get out of here, I’m putting your entire herd back on the menu.
Unsurprisingly, the hallowed-out deer carcass did not respond.
Reaching for what had to be the last few bites of the creature before they broke through, Sean didn’t even bother asking why Gel wasn’t just melting the creature the way he had seen the slime do before. There would be time for that later, and Gel seemed happy enough. Besides, now that his head had cleared a bit, he had prompts to read!
The first prompt was a swirling maelstrom of deep midnight and dark crimson. When it rose up in his vision, it was accompanied by a sound like the howling of winter’s wind through a frozen graveyard. When that had passed fireworks burst through the prompt itself and for the first time two voices, each speaking as if from opposing ends of the universe itself, read the message directly to him in tandem. The first held an ancient rasp that sounded like the Reaper itself, while the other spoke with a crazed mania that bespoke the truest madness.
Hark and rejoice, agent of Death and Chaos! You have successfully completed your first evolution and may now rise to begin your journey of devastation as a nascent Slime Warrior! Enjoy the benefits of your new form, and take our blessings with you on your travels…
The prompt vanished the instant the voices speaking, and was immediately replaced by another. This one held the same coloring, only no sounds or speech accompanied it.
Direct Bonuses Received: +2 to Might and Toughness. +1 to Cognition and Adaptation.
Indirect Bonuses Received:
* Slime Warriors gain an inherent, base understanding of how to use all weapons their slime can transform into. While this instinctual knowledge is only a foundational step on the pathway towards true mastery, additional options to acquire such knowledge may be obtained in the future.
* Slime warriors also gain access to a broader range of nodes on the manasphere than other undead of their level, thanks to their ‘morphic’ trait.
Haha-ha, alright! Sean wasn’t sure what to make of that first prompt, the voices alone had sent involuntary chills down his bones, but the second one was pure magic. Not only had he gotten far stronger and tougher – by the equivalent of six entire levels’ worth of nodes – but he had apparently also just gotten a Matrixe-level download in melee combat! Toss that in with his other bonuses, and it was no wonder he had taken down that deer. He was a badass, now!
Gonna have to try some of those weapons soon, too. Sean promised himself. Soon as I figure out how to get Gel to make himself into one, that is.
Tempting as it was to explore that, now wasn’t the time. They still had more dire deer to eat, and he still had more prompts to read! The next one gave him the creature’s actual name.
You have defeated a Stone-Shoulder Buck! You have gained 20 experience points.
Yep. “Dire Deer” is a way better name. Sean mentally rolled his eyes at that particular prompt before skipping past the next few combat-related ones. Wait, is that why it broke my arm? The fucking thing was made of stone?!
Sean rapped the knuckles of his remaining hand onto one of the plated sections they had dug past. A section he had thought was made of bone earlier. Sure enough, it gave off the same dull, thudding echo that rock always made. The same sound the walls in Bancroft’s basement had made when he had tapped them – and Sean knew instinctively that he wasn’t touching material like his own.
Guess that settles that. “Stone-shoulder” indeed. It was still a stupid name, but at least it made some sense now. Thankfully, the next prompt he came across made him forget all about it. It was a swirling, dancing blaze of orange, and its arrival was heralded by the distinctive whooshing sound of a caught flame.
Congratulations, you have earned the title: ‘Amateur Arsonist’! The purest excitements in life are found in the crackling snaps of fire burning your enemies to cinders. Real arsonists know that it is not just their foes that must burn… it is the entire world. For who dares to stand against one who has reduced their very home to ash?
This title grants an exceedingly rare chance to ignite a struck enemy or object.
Whaaaat? Sean re-read the prompt in excitement, focusing on the very last line. I can light someone up just by punching them!? What if I hit them with Gel?
Sean examined each word of the last line, but no additional clarifying information appeared. He gave a mental shrug, scraped what felt like skin at the edge of his next fistful of meat, and dismissed the prompt for now. If the title’s boon worked with weapons, then he would undoubtedly find out soon enough.
His next prompt explained the crimson patterns he had seen through the walls of the outhouse in that little dream sequence earlier. It was a midnight black, with veins of throbbing red that twisted all along its border.
Congratulations, your ability “Pulse Sense” has evolved into “Pulse Sense II”. Provides an upgrade to sensitivity and directional tracking of all sources of flowing blood. With focus, additional information about living targets may also be discerned.
With nothing else of interest left in his prompts, Sean quickly cleared through the last of them. He was about to turn his full attention back to breaking them free of this deer’s hump, or get Gel to answer some of his questions, when he felt a drain deep inside his bones and a new prompt flashed in front of his vision. This one was unadorned, devoid of color, and accompanied by no sound at all… yet fear rushed through him at the words.
As an evolved summoned creature, your presence in this world now requires greater infusions of mana to maintain. Without such expenditures, your body will wither to dust. Note: As a symbiotic creature, this will result in the death of your symbiote.
New mana upkeep cost: 2 per hour.
Oh, god damnit! Sean roared inside his mind, and he shoved his left arm through the rear end of the dead deer with all the force he could muster. Punching through to the cool night air once more, he began to claw the pair of them out.
Great as the evolutionary process had been, he felt like the hour/glass of doom hanging over his head had just lost half its sand. He didn’t have time to be locked inside this corpse any longer. They needed to finish up, scarf the rest, and get going. Get moving towards their next objective.
Because the stakes had just been raised. If either of them were going to survive the next few hours, they would need to kill again soon.