The Narrator

Back down in the sewers, the cockroach strived to feed himself, to grow and overcome.

Days passed as the cockroach worked to improve himself, unable to face up to anything head to head, the cockroach reverted to more subtle and discrete means.

He watched and waited, looking for the ideal times to catch a free meal quietly tailing some of the larger predators, and stealing morsels from these more successful hunters. Silently leeching a tiny, but substantial portion of the larger creatures' food when it lost interest or left it unattended.

Like this the cockroach scrimped and scraped to acquire more exp and more mass, shamelessly benefitting off other creature's hard work.

It was no wonder the few times the cockroach was discovered, that the stolen from beasts were furious and chased the roach down, only giving up when he scrambled back into his tiny home.

Of course, the roaches escapes were not always flawless, but he had yet to be devoured.

An achievement to be sure of in the hostile sewers.

Getting larger on his stolen rations, the cockroach became bolder, stealing more and more from larger predators before disappearing into the darkness of the sewers, gradually working his way up into a food chain that did not involve him bottomfeeding, becoming something more.

A predator, a hunter, a killer.

After weeks of hiding and cringing in the darkness, the insect struck his first blow, felling his first prey. 

The first of many, the lifeblood of another creature ran sweet in the cockroaches mouth, things would never be the same from now on.

It was a taste the cockroach would always relish.

The essence of life.

Three weeks since bugification- the Roach

‘Gotcha you slimy little bait ball.’ The thrashing form of small gutter fish is caught in my mandibles desperately trying to escape my grasp, but I don’t let it.

With a wet crunch, I bisect the gutter fish with my sharp mandibles.

{defeated gutter fish 40 exp}

I check my surroundings before staring intently at the bisected fish.

‘Mmm, time to eat.’

It has been about three weeks since I was roachified I think? And in that time, I have grown.

I originally considered myself to be nothing more than a regular intelligent roach, but now it looks like I might have a shot at being something a little more than that.

Now I am a giant roach. Compared to my initial level of zero I am now level three. Apparently, my species of roach grows with every level, so at level three I am almost the size of the Denge frog that chased me earlier, it's not possible for me too safely win against it yet, so I won’t challenge the silly frog for now.

Although I am now huge for a regular earth cockroach, I am actually still only a tiny small fry about the size of a human hand.

I had spotted roaches almost four times my size skulking around or large swarms of roaches smaller or similar in size to me.

But I avoided them all, I was quite certain these roaches cannibalized each other, judging by the empty roach shells left by these passing swarms, and I had no desire to be eaten by plebeian roaches.

So I stuck it out alone, just me and my wits against the entirety of the sewers.

It was hard and mortifying at times growing to this size, but through my clever intuition sourced from my human intellect, I made steady if somewhat risky progress.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

As it seems, a great deal of my leveling depends upon how well I eat and what I eat, to reach my current size I had to sneakily steal and scavenge the prey of greater hunters than myself, more than a dozen times I was almost caught and subsequently devoured, but through my own uncanny wits and a generous dosing of luck, I emerged unscathed from these encounters.

The tensest occurrence was the time I had been stealing a small morsel from an enormous rat that had been gorging itself on some sort of dead ape thing, the rat, its nose twitching had turned around and stared at my hiding spot even knocking over the dirty wrapper covering me. I stood stock-still not moving a muscle, thinking that this might be my last moments, but seemingly the rat mistook me for a piece of garbage as it soon turned back to its meal, greedily digging into the corpse.

That occasion was frightfully intense, but now at level three, I might actually be strong enough to hunt for my own food. The bisected fish in front of me now, is solid proof of my existing ability to hunt.

'Delightful! Now I don’t have to risk my life attempting to steal from creatures five times larger than myself.'

The only problem I had with growing larger, was how my body responded, instead of merely causing me serious discomfort my hunger was growing more intense, demanding to be fed ever more frequently, it was becoming very worrying.

The hunger clouded my mind, made it hard to concentrate and impossible to plan, I was becoming increasingly voracious and feared it might eventually completely blot out my mind, but I had no way of stopping that possibility.

'No, I had one possible way...'

Shaking my head, I brought myself to bear. 'the possibility would have to wait for now, food was here.'

Staring down at my kill a sense of latent pleasure rose to the surface of my being.

'I hunted this.'

I basked in my satisfaction for a short while, the fact that I had managed to drag down and kill another creature was... stimulating, I shifted my mouthparts, tiny sensitive hairs lapping up the flavor of another lifeforms blood.

'Invigorating' I thought before my stomach growled and bade me to eat.

After quickly surveying my surroundings once more just in case, I dug into the front half of the fish, scoffing the spiny head down while avoiding the gills in which many parasites often dwelled.

*Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!*

The fish wasn’t that good, but it wasn’t bad either, it had a simple savouriness to it if a bit earthy, surprisingly good for a fish that dwelled in a sewer waterway, still the taste of blood lingered with me filling me with a sense of satisfaction but not fullness.

The first half of the fish didn’t last me long as I scarfed it down, leaving only the slender tail end of the dead fish.

{ate gutter fish head 20 exp}

The notification floated away before being sucked into the green bar that represented experience, filling it up somewhat. I wasn’t quite sure what triggered experience earning as it seemed a little erratic.

At first, I had assumed it was earned when I killed something or escaped from a near-death experience, but it looked like it could be triggered by numerous things.

Initially, I had been elated thinking that I could exploit this to level up safely, but I soon found out it was sporadic and hard to predict, sometimes even killing things gave no experience.

The only thing that would surely earn exp was eating, or more precisely eating new or powerful creatures.

Hunger presently quietened, I picked up the last half of the gutter fish and began to make my way back to my den or crack in the wall, along the way I ran into a few lone rats.

Not the huge kind, just regular rats, the rats scattered upon spotting me scampering off into the darkness. If I wasn’t already carrying a meal I would have chased them but as it is…

'unecessary' I muttered to myself as I passed the rats by.

Ignoring the scurrying rodents in favor hauling myself up the brick walls of the sewers, the jutting but otherwise smooth bricks drew my thoughts to the weirdly gigantic and grand construction that the sewer here was.

The sewer I found myself in, was like no other my indistinct human memories knew of, this sewer was massive and sprawling and even the narrowest waterways and passages were large enough for an elephant to charge comfortably through, sewers this gargantuan in nature were unheard of on earth but here it was, right before me.

What reason could the original creators of this sewer have for making a stony labyrinth this big, such a thing was unnecessary for simple plumbing.

There had to be a reason for this odd design, but it was something I certainly had no clue towards.

Clicking to myself, I dismissed the thought and climbed the wall, approaching my den.

It was a bit of a squeeze but I pushed my way into the crack, I was much larger than my previous level zero self after all.

{safe zone reached 10 exp}

The notification whisked away into the exp bar, filling the last of the bar up. suddenly a little jingle reminiscent of trumpets blared in my head.

{LEVEL UP}

All too immediately my body swelled up, almost doubling in size as the abnormal growth that leveling up guarantees, occurred.

‘Oooooh! Dear!’

My body, now occupying most of the available space, is jammed in between the roof of the cavern and its floor.

The position is rather inconvenient and uneager to remain stuck I make actions to fix that issue, with much effort and excruciating slowness, I push my self into the larger part of the small cavern.

‘Mmm that was unpleasant,’ I thought, preening my antennae with relieved vigor.

While I had been close to leveling up I had not expected to earn exp for something I had done many times already.

Bringing a second foreleg up to brush my antennae, I began to analyze my circumstances.

'This leveling up business is potentially problematic,' I clacked to myself

If I were to level up somewhere too small for my body, I might end up crushing myself or getting stuck. 

It was something I'd be well served by keeping in mind.

Now standing in an all too cozy den looking at my suddenly tiny accommodations, I sighed or clicked as it were.

Either I needed to find a new den, or remodel my current one, My home having suddenly become just a little too cozy.

Chittering quietly to myself, I set to work excavating my house from the hold of the earth, gouging out the stone with my chitinous appendages, grudgingly working my hardened spurs like mini picks chipping gradually away at the hard stone bricks, every blow sending numbing and unpleasant vibrations through my chitinous limbs, even as I made steady progress.

I did not like digging, It was beneath me.

Frustrated, I worked steadily on making my home livable.