Sarah was silently running through the swamp to her destination. For days now, she had analyzed the bear-looking thing that she would hunt today. It often came near the swampy area where she lived. That’s how she even noticed it.
When she first saw it, she ran away. It was a hulking monstrosity, nearly twice as big as her. It had stumpy legs but an absurdly big head. It wasn’t very good at coordination, as it mostly stumbled around and hit its head here and there.
But it ate trees. When it found one that tasted good, it started chomping down. With each bite, big parts of the tree just vanished with a loud crushing sound. She really didn’t want to end up like these trees.
But she had to try, as she wanted the hide for a cloak that could cover her entire body. By now, she had managed to at least make some kind of full body suit out of many different snake skins. It looked really ugly. But at least she wasn’t naked anymore.
The downside was, that she couldn’t undress anymore as the suit was strapped to her body. The trick was to bind the skins together when they were still freshly skinned. Then they would shrink and make the knots even tighter.
She had also learned from her experience of passing out. Apparently, she depleted all of her Magic Power at once, which led to her passing out. She had learned how to manage her Magic Power consumption after passing out a few more times. And now she felt when she was running low.
She started following the pretty obvious trail of the tree-eating bear thing. At the same time, she was going through her plan and what she had learned about her abilities
And not long afterwards, she found it. It was happily munching on a tree, stumbling around it in an excited manner. Right at the moment, it looked kind of cute in a very awkward way. But now wasn’t the time for these sentiments. It was time to hit and run.
Sarah crept closer until she was a short distance away from the thing. It halted its feast, looked up in the air, and started sniffing. It suddenly turned its head in Sarah’s direction, looking alarmed and angry.
Sarah didn’t wait any longer and immediately attacked the thing's mind. It winced, and its legs started to spasm uncontrollably, which made it fall down.
The Magic Power consumption was no joke. Sarah reeled for a moment and saw double, but she pushed forward and sprang toward the thing.
Her tail shot from behind her and stung the thing in the neck. As it was still immobilized, Sarah stung it again and again. What she didn't notice was that it started to gain some control over its legs again.
It cried out and snapped at Sarah. The movement was surprisingly quick, taking Sarah by surprise. She jumped out of the way, but it still managed to rip a nasty gash in her gut.
Sarah jumped on a high tree, wheezing in pain. She checked on her wound and was relieved that her guts weren’t hanging out or something. Because it certainly felt like they did. Luckily, it was just a flesh wound, though it was bleeding quite heavily.
She pressed her hands on the wound, holding back the urge to scream out in pain, and watched the thing.
It was roaring, but it started to back away. It was stumbling even more now and starting to flee from her. But that wouldn’t do the thing any good. She pumped enough poison inside it to turn its brain and nerves into complete mush. At least in theory.
Sarah gritted her teeth, took some of the snake skin, and bandaged her wound. It was disgustingly painful, but it managed to hold back the bleeding a little. And so she started to follow the thing.
Even though it wasn’t very fast, Sarah had a hard time following it. She could only breathe very shallowly, afraid of ripping open the wound even more. It was also very hard to move in her hunched up manner, all the while pressing on the wound with her hands. But she pushed through.
After a while, they were in a hilly area, deep inside the drier part of the spatial error. The thing slowed down more and more. The poison probably started to do its nasty work.
The thing walked towards a heavily grown-over hill and crawled under a bush. And then it vanished.
Anxious about loosing her prey, Sarah came closer and took a good look at the bush. But it was so dense that she couldn’t see anything. She gingerly pulled some twigs to the side and managed to see some sort of cave behind them. But the thing was nowhere in sight.
She pushed her head a little farther inside the bush to see more. It felt like her heart wanted to jump out of her chest.
Trying to make as little sound as possible, she pushed her body inside the bush to be able to see more of the cave. The twigs tucked at her wound, causing her to whimper slightly every time.
When she was far enough through, she could finally see the whole cave. It seemed to slightly curve after some distance. And there was the thing. Half of its body seemed to be hidden behind the curve, only making its lower body visible. It twitched slightly but didn’t move other than that.
Sarah pushed herself through entirely, which caused a twig to rip at her wound harshly. Her wound started bleeding stronger again. Now she couldn’t hold back a small scream, as it burned like hell and she was a little dizzy from blood loss.
Afraid of alarming the thing, she bit down on her hand to muffle the sounds she made. Luckily, the thing still didn’t move.
She walked inside the cave, her tail at the ready to strike at the smallest movement. But there was no need for that. When Sarah could see the head of the thing, it was clear that it was close to dying.
Blood trickled out of its uneven eyes, and they were looking in two different directions. It was clear that it had lost the ability to control them.
It was also barely breathing anymore and still only twitched. It was a little disturbing for Sarah. She had never killed something as horribly as this before.
With a weird feeling inside her, she gently touched its head and slowly shut down its body functions. It was pretty easy now, and she barely used up any Magic Power, as the thing was filled to the brim with her very own poison. Not long after, it stopped moving altogether.
Sarah sighed a breath of relief and knelt down to inspect it further. At this moment, she saw some movement. Scared by the surprise, she stumbled backward and fell on her back, causing another painful sting in her stomach.
She was afraid that this incident would cause her death and hurriedly looked back at the thing. But the cause of the movement was something else.
Two horribly deformed beings crawled out from under the dead thing. They started moaning in weird voices while patting the dead body with their uneven legs.
The thing apparently had kids. But they looked so strongly deformed that Sarah doubted that they would survive. The proportions of their bodies were just so out of place that it was barely possible for them to move.
A scary thought paralyzed her for a moment. They were obviously mutated. And she was too. What if one of her mutations went wrong and she ended up looking like them? Just crawling around in the dirt, barely able to do anything more than wriggle her body. The thought was incredibly disturbing.
With a grimace, Sarah went to the little cubs. She gently placed her hands on them while calming their minds. They stopped moving and fell to the ground. With a hard look on her face, Sarah shut down their body functions. It wasn’t hard. In fact, it was even easier to kill them than to kill a little lizard. Their deformation apparently hadn’t just impacted their bodies.
Sarah felt a bitter taste in her mouth, while she dragged the deformed little bodies deeper inside the cave, so she didn’t have to look at them again. They were a reminder to her, that her Mutation specialization could go horribly wrong. But then again, she didn’t have much choice but to push forward in order to survive in this place.
When she had dragged them a sufficient distance away, she returned. Then she lay down right at the entrance of the cave. As the tension faded away, the wounds started throbbing wildly, and she felt pretty sick.
But the only thing she could do now was wait for the wound to get better. It wasn’t bad enough for her to mutate herself, as she wanted to save this ability for emergencies. So she just laid on the ground, waiting for the bleeding to stop.
After a while, she fell into a light slumber, having weird and abstract dreams about her recent fight. The two deformed cubs popped up again and again. At some point, she noticed that she was one of the cubs, trapped in a horribly deformed body.
This caused her to jump awake, feeling a little feverish and weak. After she shook off the weird dream she just had, she checked on her wound.
It had luckily closed up by now, even though it seemed a little inflamed. She was amazed that this was even possible with her highly toxic blood. Maybe there were also some mutated bacteria or something. She certainly didn’t hope so.
She dragged herself over to the body, which started to look a little bloated already. It looked like she slept longer than she thought. That would be really nasty. She took out a sharpened rock and started to cut off its skin.
It took quite some time, with the rock breaking in half in the middle of it. But she managed to do it. Sarah stumbled out of the bush, holding the bloody fur in her arm, and gagged a little. The smell inside was really horrible. She was used to the smell of rotting flesh by now. But it was another thing if something as huge as the bear started to rot inside a closed space on top of that.
"All of this, just to hide my appearance." She said with a sigh while holding the bloody fur in front of her. She couldn’t help but doubt that it had really been worth it. But it was done, and she could only move forward.
Leaving behind the cave with the mutated bears, she slowly went back to her clearing.
She felt really at home there by now. It was the place where she collected everything that could be useful. Skins, bones, claws, stones, and other things that could be used to make things. She wasn’t quite sure why she was doing it, as she had no idea what she would even do with most of this stuff. But it gave her something to do, so she just did it.
After a long time of stumbling towards her clearing, she finally arrived. She slumped to the ground with a relaxed sigh, starting to feel a bit better about her day. It might have been a nasty experience, but she had managed to do it. She survived and got stronger through it. That was all that mattered.
Her mindset was somewhat restored again, and she started to fashion something like a cloak out of the fur.
The result was pretty crappy. But she was able to tie the cloak around her upper body to hold it in place, and it hid her horns quite well.
"Alright." She said contently. She was finally strong enough to protect herself, and she had something to hide her deformations. Her wound seemed mostly fine by now, only stinging now and then when she made sudden movements.
She took a deep breath and fixed the still wet cloak around her, hiding her mutations.
"Time to go meet some people."