‘Well, shit… I’m small again..’ I thought to myself as I look around at the once again big and scary world.

‘At least what happened kind of makes sense. If I take to much damage my body needs biomass to repair itself. Since I lost so much to that plant, my body used all my reserves and now I’m a puppy... I guess it’s time to hunt again.’

I head out of the cave trying not to stumble on my suddenly shorter legs. The sun was high in the sky and I could barely see. The trees around the cave were so out of focus they looked like they were censored. ‘I can’t hunt like this. I need to fix my eyes at least.’

I sat down and focused my mind on my eyes. Trying to enhance them a little bit. Which made my current problem obvious. As soon as I started focusing my mind, I realized just how little biomass I had. My body felt almost completely empty, I shifted a tiny amount to my eyes to try and improve them.

WARNING – WARNING – WARNING

Biomass reserves are extremely low

Transformation ability severely limited until more biomass is acquired.

WARNING – WARNING - WARNING

Looks like my eye improvement took the last of my biomass. My vision didn’t even improve that much. At least It doesn’t feel like I’m looking through wax paper any more. I should be able to find something small I can absorb.

I headed out into the forest to search for some tasty biomass so I can grow again, I have had enough being small. It may not have been long, but it sure wasn’t fun.

______________________

Victoria had messed up. Not long after her meeting had she found out that the youngling she had written off as dead had survived. But he had wrecked the commander’s office and stolen the untested trans-dimensional ring. Now the commander was scouring the facility for our kind once again. It had been years since the last time we were actively hunted. She had to get at least get in contact with the youngling and try to give him some guidance. As far as she knows the project responsible for creating them had been scrapped and the survivors had been ‘liquidated’.

That she had found another youngling had to mean that someone was continuing the experiment. She had to find out who, then she could steal the experiment from them and create more of her kind. The only problem would be how to train them all. The training world this facility used was a low tech one that was one of the first ones we found. We figured out that normal strength training coupled with hunting monsters on other worlds made you ridiculously stronger. We couldn’t explain it but the director immediately started sending people for training and study. If we could figure out how they are getting stronger and bring it back, there was no telling just how much money that would be worth. The problem was that travel to this world was heavily monitored. She had managed to get a couple of her people sent there while disguised as lab animals. Within the first month they had progressed smoothly, but there are still too few of them. She knew that in order to destroy the facility and stop the people that ran it she would need more strength. Right now, she was sitting at her desk and was looking through some files she snuck. It was a list of new hires that never showed up. They had applied and been accepted but when they were called to come back in there was no answer. Upon investigation it was discovered that they never made it home. There was only about 20 of these incidents out of a group of 250 applicants so it was ignored.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

But she had found it after sifting through a couple months’ worth of paperwork. She had found the records of all but one of the ten missing applicants. There was one of the missing applicants whose paperwork was mysteriously….missing.

There wasn’t even any record of him checking in at the front desk. Like he walked into the building and disappeared. This was highly unusual, the director demanded that everyone be responsible with their paperwork. He handed out severe punishments to those who didn’t. On one occasion the head of a department was sent to a recently found world by himself as punishment. He came back a different person. Covered in scars and missing a couple fingers, he no longer doubted the severity of the director’s punishments. No one did. He was only in there for half an hour and they had to drag him back out.

So finding someone who had the balls to openly mess with the boss’s paperwork was extremely rare. She had to get to the bottom of this. If the person who stole the papers also continued the research on her people she needed to find out.

______

Deep within the bowels of the illegal research facility, a man stood staring at his new creation. A bizarre amalgamation of several ‘test subjects’ all combined into one creature. It had the legs of a ostritch, the body of a lion and three human heads. The three heads all carried the same expression of horror and pain. The man watched as his newly created chimera floated in the vat of fluid and smiled. He typed in a couple commands on the console in front of the tank and a low level current was ran through the liquid. The chimera twitched in response, bringing an even wider smile to the man’s face as he upped the current. The chimera was almost flailing in the liquid before he cut off the current and watched how the creature reacted.

After a couple minutes of no response he switched the type of energy he introduced to one that only the people in this facility had access to in the entire world. Mana.

He introduced a small crystal to the tank and watched as it slowly sank. To the man’s surprise it stopped sinking right in front of the chimera. It seemed to hover for a second in the liquid before it disappeared right in front of the man’s eyes. He tried to recall what just happened in his mind when he noticed something. To see if he was right he dropped two more of the mana crystals into the vat. Sure enough, as soon as they floated in front of the creature they disappeared as well. He was paying extra close attention this time so he managed to confirm what he was thinking. They weren’t disappearing. The chimera was eating them.

He noticed a flash of some sharp teeth right before the crystal disappeared. He smiled. He had succeeded. It was alive.

His creation.

Unlike the first failure he threw out near that stupid ant experiment of his colleague, this creature would earn him a large bonus and maybe even a new contract with the director. He was running out of time to present a new experiment before he would be deemed ‘useless’. Now they would be begging for him to stay. Giving him anything he wanted, just to keep him working here. He was almost drooling at the prospect. He stroked the vat almost lovingly as his thoughts turned to his imagined wonderful future.

“Now I just have to test you and see how you do in the field.” He said to himself.

“Now that I think about it there was a new world found the other day, apparently some experiment managed to escape into it somehow. That sounds like the perfect testing ground to me, how about you?” He asked the chimera. It just floated there in response.

“I thought so” He smiled at it. Before he went back to running some more tests on his new creation. It would be a little while before he could actually start the test. Due to the security still being on high alert, but things should calm down soon. The man walked over to his desk and looked at the files in a messy pile on the corner of it. He picked up the top file and went through it one last time before throwing it away.

“I always knew you were going to be a failure.” He said while staring at the photo that had fell out when he threw it into the trash.

“Son”