Victor knew he needed to gather more information about the alien world around him. There was an interconnectedness to the forest that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. The underlying network was evident in how the flora and fauna behaved in relation to one another. As he meandered through the woods, he caught glimpses of tiny insects protecting their terrestrial homes with symbiotic alacrity, and at many points, plants would actually move to hinder his progress. The whole ecosystem had identified him as a foreign invader and sought to impede his movements. Victor was frustrated by the interference and decided to find higher ground.
He slithered his way to the tree near his initial spawn point. It was taller than the others, offering a better vantage point. His microscopically ridged hide easily let him wind his way up and around the tree. The roughness of his exterior gripped the ridges of the bark and gave him the traction to scale the tree as smoothly as he would slithering along the ground while his new armor protected him from the scratches as the tree used its limbs to hinder his ascension.
He wryly noted that looking like a tryst between a flatworm and a snake at least had its positives. Navigating the tree’s trunk was less exerting than it would’ve been in his original body. Once he reached the top branches of the forest giant. He realized his mistake.
I’m a fucking idiot, he mentally berated himself.
He was still operating as if his new body worked like his old one. Getting a higher vantage point would have been better if he had actual working eyes. However, his sensing organs were hampered by distance. Height didn’t increase Victor’s range of observation because his senses now had a firm distance cap. At the end of his field of vision, his ability to see simply stopped, replaced by inky darkness.
This was a more frightening prospect than Victor had realized. Human vision was meant to allow them to see predators from a distance, which was clearly the opposite. He could study anything happening within his immediate surroundings but was blind to the happenings outside of them.
Now that Victor had positioned himself in the tree, he couldn’t even sense what was lying on the ground beneath him. There was a fifteen-foot sphere of vision in all directions, but now he had left himself vulnerable to someone attacking outside his sensory capabilities. He would have to be more careful in the future not to position himself so that he left an opening for attack.
This is a tall fucking tree, Victor groused, taking his anger at himself out on the forest giant.
If he had his human mouth, he would’ve sighed. His ability to see distances, or lack thereof, would be something he needed to improve. He resolved to find an appropriate animal to absorb. Unfortunately, he had encountered only insects, and his senses were already strange enough. He didn’t need to add compound vision to his complement of abilities. Hopefully, he could find a hawk or similar predator. Until then, he would have to make do with what he had. There was no use crying over spilled milk and missing eyeballs.
Victor rewound his way down the tree and remained alert. He didn’t think there would be a predator waiting at the bottom in the short time he had been in the tree's boughs, but one didn’t stay alive without a healthy amount of suspicion and paranoia. His life, from birth to death, had taught him that much.
Once Victor reached the bottom, he used his vision to remain as much in the tall grass as possible. He was increasingly worried that something more lethal than a spider would find him before he could see it. The intelligent thing would be to find a place to hide and wait for prey to come to him. Even discounting the armored plates along his spine, his whole body had been optimized for ambush hunting.
His vision lit up with a life signature at his 2’oclock position as if his thoughts manifested into reality. Victor slowed as he focused his senses and tried to determine what he was seeing. In the roots of a massive tree before him, a pulsing blue-white light resonated with his sight, revealing the location of another lifeform. As his vision focused on the area, Victor began to make out the details of the tree.
He could see how the gnarled and twisted roots created a space within them. He couldn’t make out what was in the burrow, but he could tell by the strength of the life indicator that it was smaller than himself.
Though, that didn’t mean much. Victor couldn’t take size for granted. Every time he had received a brief about respecting wildlife as a young Marine, his instructors had always emphasized that the smaller creatures often killed you faster than their more substantial counterparts. For example, baby snakes didn’t know how to modulate their venom, injecting the whole load in one go.
Victor snaked forward as stealthily as possible. Though, he did not need to try to be silent consciously. His form made nary a whisper as it slid under, over, or around obstructions without intentionally remaining quiet.
Part of that was his natural form. Snakes tended to be muted. However, he recognized that the softness of his hide actually worked in his favor. Instead of remaining rigid and disturbing the natural detritus of the forest, it tended to flex and bend around objects, making him stealthier.
Victor didn’t possess any hearing organs to confirm, but as he watched his victim hiding in the sanctuary of the tree roots, he knew his movements hadn’t alerted it.
As he reached the burrow, he withdrew slightly to give his senses a chance to penetrate the den. Unfortunately, his sight didn’t provide any more clues. Something about the tree's exterior prevented a more in-depth perusal of his prey.
He didn’t mind this series of events. It would have been nice to gather more information on his opponent before engaging with them, but it was more important to learn the limits of his new physique. The quickest way for him to die would be to become overconfident in his body than he should be, finding himself the afternoon snack of a more evolved predator.
Victor crawled above the den along the tree's roots and angled his snout toward the ground, intending to surprise his enemy from the ceiling. From his time in the Marine Corps, he knew that the entrance to a domicile was always the most dangerous position. If the snake could ambush his target from an unsuspected angle, it would rapidly increase his chances of surviving the encounter.
Since he didn’t have sight in the traditional sense, and the ridges on his scales allowed him to grip the wooden ceiling of the burrow, he could hopefully ambush the opponent and kill it before it had a chance to do significant damage to him.
Adrenaline, or whatever the snake's approximation of adrenaline, was pumped through Victor’s body. It had been decades since he had felt so alive. Political debates, campaign rallies, and donor luncheons couldn’t compare with the primal feeling of crushing one’s enemies through sheer determination and physical effort. The last time he had felt this way was when he had been in actual combat.
With one last breath to steady his nerves and put him in that magical zone between panic and alertness that allowed one to accomplish extraordinary things, Victor explosively shot into the burrow and blasted acid from his mouth simultaneously.
The acid accurately projected and hit a gigantic beetle lying in a state of torpor below him. The acid immediately started to emit caustic smoke once it landed on its carapace, and the startling stimuli were enough to shake the creature from its restful state.
The burrow was large enough for the beetle to gather its six legs underneath it. It was round and had a sizeable defensive shell on its back, but it turned toward Victor to present savage-looking mandibles.
Victor didn’t know much about insects but knew that if those mandibles could squeeze him, the beetle would have enough power to slice through his flesh with little resistance, armored plates notwithstanding. This insect was a wood eater, and Victor’s hide was far softer than wood.
The serpent launched another caustic attack at his enemy’s face, hoping to splash the beetle’s primary offensive weapons. If he could degrade them somehow, it would dramatically increase his chance of victory.
The first acid attack seemed like it was doing little to hurt the beetle truly, but with the latest assault, it let out a high-pitched squeal. It violently lashed out in retribution, trying to use its front legs to slash Victor. The cramped confines of the burrow didn’t allow the beetle to lean on its hind legs, so it couldn’t get the range to let its claw-tipped legs reach Victor.
The attack was slow, and that, combined with the favorable positioning, gave Victor room to operate. He twisted to avoid the swipe, his instincts driving his conscious mind as they detected an opening. All sense of reality outside the immediate moment vanished, and the predator within his heart was finally unleashed with the savage, murderous desire.
Victor analyzed every detail of the moment and seized the initiative. He launched himself into the burrow at the awkwardly positioned beetle. His body’s instincts drew on his life experience forged in battle—a synthesis of biological wisdom and sentient knowledge.
A wild swipe from the beetle’s mandibles connected with his side. The predator had expected the sharp pain of a cut, an acceptable cost, but was quickly reminded of the weakness of his frame. The claws easily shredded through Victor’s keratin armor into the soft musculature below. The exquisite agony of flesh and bones being torn and broken rippled through his consciousness before the mandible finally caught on the junction of several scales.
Victor hissed at his mortal enemy through the pain before he body-tackled the beetle. The total weight of a third of his snake-like form crashed into the insect at full speed. The charge brought the two together. Acid flew, and mandibles did their best to land another strike. The insect flailed wildly, its claws cutting through Vcitor’s flesh as the snake’s acidic reprisal horrifically melted its compound eyes.
Victor saw his opportunity. His enemy was blind and vulnerable, so the predator violently wrapped himself around his mortal foe with no other intent than to kill or be killed. Unlike last time, this enemy was not made of rock, and although the shell on the back of the insect was thick, the soft, fleshy belly was ripe for attack.
The bug’s carapace worked against the beetle as Victor flexed his muscles and felt his body stabilize against the shell to rend his coarse flesh through the beetle's underside like piano wire across an unsuspecting throat. Ichor gushed from the wound and painted the inside of the burrow a sickening hue.
The beetle thrashed in his grip, so Victor continued to rend his mortal foe even as his blood gushed from open wounds. Its demise, step by step, drew closer with every moment.
Die, he thought. Die, damn you. DIE!
The carapace slaked off, piece by piece, as Victor roared repeatedly for the kill.
I will eat you! He screamed.
The bug’s body finally seemed to give. A crack in its underbelly showed a small, beating organ. Victor lunged into the bug’s torso and ripped into the organ with blind fury.
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DIE! He screamed.
Acid poured from his glands into the still-beating organ. The bug thrashed a final twitching resistance, and the legs slacked to the floor. Victor faded into unconsciousness from the blood loss and extreme exertion. The darkness felt eternal but passed in mere seconds before Victor stuttered awake again.
Victor relaxed the coils he wound around the beetle in a death grip. He lay on his back, panting while his snake-like tongue hung from his mouth. The serpent was exhausted and grievously injured. The insect thrashed and fought in his grasp until it finally died. In the process, it had left a score of shallow cuts all over his body with its barbed limbs.
Victor instinctively knew there was only one way to heal the damage. The serpent rolled onto his belly and feasted upon his conquered foe. While eating, he felt his wounds knit themselves together, and the biomass of his victim transformed into Victor’s flesh. By the end of the meal, the small gashes on his body had healed, and silvery scars had replaced the former injuries.
A wave of beetle memories and genetic information flooded Victor’s mind, but he didn’t find any physical traits he wanted to adopt into his physiology. However, that didn’t mean the insect possessed nothing of value. Victor saw an exciting growth in its brain. The addition linked the insect and the rest of the forest in a way the spider lacked. It was a piece of the hivemind that the snake had observed in his travels.
Victor eagerly adopted the mutation, fueling the growth in his brain using the beetle's biomass. A warm fuzziness enveloped him as the politician became aware of a vast presence in the middle of the forest. The serpent could sense it like a lodestone to a compass. Everything in the woods interacted instinctually with the biological intelligence.
Confused, Victor studied the new sensation as the gnawing hunger returned. Whatever collective unconsciousness the forest possessed, the serpent wanted it. Every organic imperative in his body screamed for him to travel to the forest's center and consume the unconsciousness.
The politician didn’t let instinct override good sense. As much as he wanted to travel to the new objective, he knew he needed to rest, and the burrow was as good a place as any. He needed to rest, refit, and reflect on his travels. Journeying into the unknown without appropriate preparation was self-destructive.
Victor curled up in his new home, a large part of him craving the chaos and complicated nature of combat. He couldn’t be sure how much of the feeling was his personality or what changes the god wrought.
While he enjoyed the machinations of politics, it lacked the primal feeling of warfare. Victor didn’t consider himself a bloodthirsty person—violence was a means to an end. But in this world, in this form, he couldn’t deny the satisfaction of existing on the knife edge between evolution and death.
It was a sign that the malicious god had irrevocably altered Victor. He knew that these weren’t his human motivations but the driving impetus of a monster. Despite the implications, he was…happy. This was a type of paradise to the new Victor.
He fell asleep with these thoughts running through his mind. He had vibrant dreams of Middle Eastern bazaars, endless desert mountains, and bullets cracking by his head. He remembered the screams of the wounded and the sound of an assault helicopter thundering overhead.
The dreams gradually morphed into alien places and unfamiliar technology. A pulsating organic growth beating in time to Victor’s heartbeat transitioned to a battlefield of winged and clawed monsters facing off against humanoid adversaries. The assault helicopter was replaced by a floating squid-like creature, its tendrils reaching to the ground to slurp up pools of liquid biomass. Despite the horror of their construction, Victor felt comfort and kinship in their presence. He yearned to be among them, spreading like a plague through the galaxy.
Victor awoke feeling refreshed and brimming with untapped energy. It was time to hunt.
He spent the day prowling for victims, inextricably drawn toward the forest's heart where the collective unconsciousness dwelled. Along the way, he killed and consumed a variety of lesser insects. They didn’t possess any adaptations worth adopting, but they provided biomass for his evolution. He grew by leaps and bounds, soon doubling in length and becoming as thick as a human waist.
His keratin armor thickened into dense plates with sharpened insectile spines. They weren’t weapons by any means, but the paralytic coating on his scales receded to form dedicated ducts leading to the thorny protrusions. The transformation resulted in a minor loss of utility while effectively increasing its potency. Victor used the new improvements to wrap his coils around his victims and pump them full of stupor-inducing venom.
As the sun rose higher into the sky, Victor’s path was smoothed by a combination of environmental factors. Since his adoption of the hivemind growth, the forest no longer barred his way. In fact, the flora subtly assisted his travel, clearing lanes for him to journey and causing the less evolved fauna to grow docile in his presence. These unfortunate victims became his travel provisions, and Victor sensed the hivemind wasn’t meant for predators like him. He was coopting and taking advantage of a network constructed for more benevolent members of the ecosystem.
The second benefit came from the fauna themselves. The animals in the forest instinctively detected the relative strengths of their peers. Insects from species he killed many times before avoided him, and higher-evolved creatures wouldn’t allow him to pass through their territory without attempting to kill him. It increased his hunting efficiency, allowing him to find animals and potential adaptations he hadn’t seen before.
Victor felt amused to find a more meritocratic system than human society. The only thing that conferred power and prestige was battle experience in the word's most absolute sense. No creature was impeded in their desires to topple their opponents and claim their territory for themselves. Ultimately, it seemed like a more honest approach to life, and Victor reveled in his new existence.
Sooner than he realized, it was the end of the day, but he felt he could hunt the whole night, too. Victor considered that his vision wasn’t dependent upon the time of day, and the serpent felt a pressing need to reach the wood’s center.
Deciding to press on, Victor continued his hunt late into the night. Victor had thought the forest was alive during the day, but he had been mistaken. At night, the forest was a bustle of activity. Creatures of all types were hunting, mating, and traveling. The action confused Victor’s senses as he had to track multiple movements in his field of view. Fortunately, most of the animals he encountered were similar in complexity to him or just slightly above.
He noticed that the diversity of his opponents increased in a single direction. It aligned perfectly with the hivemind sitting in the back of his thoughts. The serpent had no qualms following the path laid out by the collective unconsciousness. He had no idea where he was concerning the world at large or where the closest sign of civilization was.
He hoped that by mutating and growing stronger, he could change his form enough to integrate into whatever alien society presented itself. He couldn’t be the strangest thing in this world, and the only way he could pursue his God-given mission would be to get a group of people behind him. For some reason, he didn’t think people would be willing to follow a snake-worm thing, and the mysterious deity had to have known that. In the meantime, he would hunt and kill wherever his instincts took him.
A life signature rapidly entered his senses as he waited in the brush for his next prey. He tried to slide toward the disturbance and found that it was hurtling from above him. He hid in tall grass and desperately tried to turn toward the new threat. He was too slow.
Two pairs of tibial spines hooked into his flesh, punching through the unarmored portion of his hide and digging deeply into his musculature. He hissed in pain, trying to spin and wrest free of his attacker’s grasp. His fighting slowed the creature as it buzzed its wings to gain altitude. They vibrated violently like the whirring of a helicopter. Victor could twist his body enough to focus his senses on the creature that attacked him.
If he didn’t know any better, it was a praying mantis similar in type to any common garden variation found on Earth. Of course, this mantis was significantly more prodigious than its earth-grown brethren, easily capturing and lifting the twelve-foot-long serpent. As he felt the deadly claws clamp down and draw more blood, he cursed himself for his ignorance.
Victor was pissed that even though he had upgraded his armor, he had found himself in such a predicament. He hadn’t seen a flying creature all day, and the serpent had become stupidly complacent, thinking himself the most intelligent and ferocious monster in the forest. After all, he had only stumbled upon a variety of different insects. They didn’t seem threatening on their own.
Despite Victor’s thrashing, the mantis regained some lift and launched higher into the air. It weaved around the trees and flew deeper into the forest while Victor writhed in its forelegs below. He couldn’t quite gain enough leverage to use his paralytic spines to their full effect, but he got a coil around the mantis’ forearms.
After a couple more moments, Victor got a second coil around the forelegs and noticed the beating wings slow by a fraction. Victor cheered in his head, assuming one of his spines had made contact with the mantis. If he could get the flying insect to slow down, he could wrap himself around it more to inject more of the paralytic compound.
Victor needed the mantis to fall out of the air. He was risking injury by falling from this height, but he didn’t want to be taken to a mantis’ mate and offered as tribute. To have his head popped off and eaten alive seemed a ghastly way to die. Besides, that was his job.
Soon enough, the results he sought occurred, and the mantis slowed sufficiently, such that the downward drag was enough for Victor to twist his body further around the insect. Even the strength of the forearms relaxed somewhat, and Victor managed to move his body more freely. Unfortunately, the activity pulled the mantis’ spine from deep inside his body, and more blood sprayed from his wounds.
The mantis started losing altitude as the paralytic began to take effect. Victor shut his mouth and struggled mightily to wrap his body around the bug. The result was almost immediate, and they hurtled toward the ground. Victor consoled himself by describing the descent as a controlled crash instead of its actual designation: an absolute fucking disaster.
The mantis and serpent hit the ground with a bone-shattering impact. Pain lit a fire in Victor’s nervous system as many things felt wrong simultaneously. A quick glance at the mantis showed a twisted wreck on the ground. Its limbs were clearly in the wrong position, bodily fluids were painted over the forest floor, and delicate insect winges resembled shattered windowpanes. Victor didn’t want to imagine what he looked like.
He could only think about the fire in his body, but the monster knew what he had to do. Acquiring biomass would heal his injuries if he could kill and consume his prey. The mantis seemed so far away.
Victor painstakingly snaked his way to the head of the body and wrapped his frame in a loop around its head. He took special care to wind his figure over the deadly mandibles so they would be restrained from being used against him. He twisted his form to apply the pressure of his ridged skin against the mantis’ carapace, and the head separated from the body with a slimy gush.
Victor didn’t have the energy to be excited about his conquest. Instead, he used his acid and tried to consume the creature quickly. He wasn’t sure how far the mantis had taken him into the forest, but he could assume he was in a territory where he would be the hunted, not the hunter.
Luckily, his nourishment didn’t leave any pesky bodies for scavengers to find. All in all, he was a highly efficient hunter. Like magic, his wounds faded as he consumed the mantis. Interestingly enough, because the flying bug had been a more sophisticated creature, it seemed that he earned more biomass for its consumption. Soon, the rush of memories and genetic information flowed from the insect into Victor’s mind.
With a thought, a vast list of choices presented themselves to Victor. He was overwhelmed by the content of the mantis’ existence. He could give himself a new circulatory system, change his musculature or bone structure, and add a variety of new senses. In particular, the mantis was one of the few insects that possessed three-dimensional vision—a feature Victor sorely missed.
Victor knew everything on the list had a cost, and the more complicated the mutation, the more biomass was required. Thinking quickly, Victor knew he needed a melee weapon. The serpent had no fangs or claws, and the lack of a melee weapon almost cost him his life. He had also run into cases where his acid wasn’t beneficial. What he needed was something simple yet effective.
With a flash of inspiration, Victor knew what he needed from the bug. He gleefully chose to emulate the mantis’ scythe-like appendages. His physiology kicked into overdrive, and the transformations began to occur as quickly as Victor could siphon up more biomass.
His ribs expanded, making way for complicated ball sockets, two on each side, to form. Limbs grew from each joint, terminating in long, fang-like bony protrusions. The bottom third of his skeletal system widened to create a proto-structure for hips that tapered gracefully into his snakelike tail. A third set of appendages grew from the buds of his hips, a smaller clone of his arms. Victor’s paralytic glands extended to the new components, allowing him to inject venom with every bladed strike.
Victor rose up on his tail, balancing carefully using his new weapons, and slid forward like a naga from Hindu and Buddhist mythology. He was top-heavy and slower than his previous form, but the monster was pleased with his evolution. With these new weapons, the serpent wouldn’t have to worry about getting swooped out of the air. He possessed more options for physical combat.
He knew there was an opportunity cost for upgrading his weapons rather than his senses, but the mantis ambushing him from above had frightened him more than he liked to admit. No infantryman wanted to be attacked from the sky without his own cover. The first rule of combat was to own the heavens, and Victor wasn’t in any position to do that as a ground-dwelling snake. He knew it was time to find a hiding place, recover, and get the lay of the land