Damage warnings all over. My mind slowly came back online, sitting in a half-functional state for at least a couple of minutes as I extricated myself from the tangle of branches that I had been laying on during the night. I had to check myself all over to ensure that I wasn't bleeding or otherwise ruptured somewhere. Thankfully everything checked out fine. Better than fine even, my skin was near-immaculate despite the fact that I had collapsed mid-stride into a bunch of material with rough edges. Now if only I could convince my body that I'm not actually damaged behind my eyes, I thought.
Looking around I could see the pile of regurgitated organic matter from the night before. Small insects were crawling all over it, disassembling it to feed themselves. Up in the trees my stored fibers were still where I had left them, but the tuber roots had been pilfered. It wasn't a great loss considering that they were poisonous, though losing a potential source of slow-acting poison was irritating. I should pick a few more of those roots in case a situation comes up that would make them useful, I thought.
As I inhaled and filled my lungs so that my body would be able to stretch out to its full size I picked up traces of chemicals in the air that I hadn't noticed before. It was very hard to tell directionality of smells with the sorry excuse for a nose that I had planted on my face. I circled the bush, trying to figure out where the smell was coming from to no avail. Finally, I scratched my nose and realized that the smell was coming from my own body. It's this bad already? I thought. Warbreed bodies produced odor, but not at the rate that my current one seemed to. Their odor was also a form of olfactory camouflage and smelled more like leaves and trees. My current one was... not that.
After finishing up making the remainder of my fibers into cordage and tying them up as well I headed back to the creek. Smelling of anything but the natural environment was a tactical disadvantage, so washing was required. I didn't have any soap, nor did I have any materials to make soap, but then again I wasn't actually as dirty as I had expected either. Simply rolling around inside the water was enough to remove the majority of both the smell and the dirt that had built up on me over the last few days. It also gave me pleasant signals which indicated that this behavior was something I should be doing for maintenance.
I finished bathing, shook myself off, and went to check my snares. Of the five, three had not been set off and the two that had been set off had no prey captured in them. I had to admit that I was disappointed. At first I thought that maybe the animals were smarter than I had been expecting, but around one of the two sprung snares was a large amount of blood that indicated that the problem might not have been the traps or the prey, but something else entirely. After all, what animal can resist a trapped meal? I thought as I looked around to see if the blood trailed off anywhere.
After a shamefully long amount of time looking around I finally got a visual handle on the direction of the blood and began following it. I assumed the lack of fur, skin, bones, or other remains meant that the prey had not been consumed on the spot but instead brought to a nest or some other safe area. If I could actually smell anything I could just follow the trail the easy way, I griped as I strained my eyes looking for dark red blotches. Surprisingly the trail led back in the direction of the creek. Deciding it was best to check if my intuition was correct I followed its rough direction until I saw water again.
I was at a spot that, by my estimation, was two to three hundred meters away from the location I had cut the reeds and bathed at. Beside the river I saw a structure that could only be a sort of animal hive made of mud and sticks. Drawing my axe, I approached cautiously and looked for an entrance. The area around the hive was dotted with small stones that appeared to have been placed by whatever made the structure. Each rock was around seven or eight centimeters in diameter, and they appeared near-equidistant from one another. More some kind of symbolism? Semi-sapients? I wondered as I stepped in closer. My ears strained to try to hear any movement within the hive, but found none.
“Ack!” I hissed as damage warnings came from my foot. I looked down to see that the stone I had stepped on had sprouted pinching claws, one of which was secured tightly around my smallest toe. The stone shifted and sprouted legs as well, then eye-stalks. A crab with a strangely smooth shell looked at me and clicked its free claw, then pinched that one onto my biggest toe. All the other stones began to shift as well, revealing that they had all been crabs which had buried themselves in the soft mud by the creek as a form of camouflage. They started to hiss and click their claws, making threat displays at me while I pondered if they were edible.
One pinch-filled hour later I had successfully caught twenty-three crabs while the remainder had managed to flee into the forest or slide down the creek fast enough that pursuing them wasn't worth it. After I had pulled the initial crab off of my foot and retreated to a distance which was not aggravating to the crustaceans, I took the time to tie up a bag from cordage and find a long stick before approaching again. The crabs, being quite unintelligent, would pinch the stick with enough prompting allowing me to pull them off of the ground and store them inside the netted bag. Halfway through my capture they began to get wise to my tricks and came out in force to attack me. Fortunately for me their pinches were not even hard enough to break my skin. The latter half of the hunt devolved into me pulling them off of my feet and legs while struggling to keep the net bag shut so that they would not escape.
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Inside what I had initially though was a nest were dozens of clutches of eggs as well as the dead and decaying bodies of a number of rodents and insects. As was now usual for me I couldn't identify any of their species, but the rats looked like rats, the squirrels like squirrels, and the bugs like bugs. I tried to find my stolen prey but determined that after my poisoning experience I wasn't going to risk ingesting any non-safe food material. It's impressive, but also concerning, that my stomach can even be poisoned, I thought as I hauled the crabs back to the bush and tied the netted bag tight. With a swift motion I hung my new prey from a tree branch.
Making fire was never a very difficult task for me, but I found that trying to make one out of the wood I could find nearby was about as hard as it had ever been. The environment was quite damp, to be expected for an area near an ocean, which greatly reduced my chances of finding properly dried wood. On the plus side I managed to make a number of sharpened sticks that could be used for cooking the crabs once I did have a campfire up and running. Warbreed always said cooked food tasted better to them, I thought as I ground the only two dry pieces of wood I had together as quickly as I could, considering how much this body rewarded me for the fruit I can't help but anticipate this meal will be equally rewarding.
Another quarter-hour and two failed starts later I had a small fire made on the ground. Normally I would have surrounded it with rocks, but the environment was simply so wet at ground level that I doubted any fire could spread fast enough to escape my attention and become dangerous. Reaching into the hanging bag of crabs, I extracted three ornery crustaceans and impaled them on three sharp sticks. I wasn't any sort of expert in crustaceans, but I did my best to avoid rupturing their digestive systems in case their rotten diet contained compounds that could sicken me. As the crabs slowly writhed in confusion I stuck the sticks into the ground and tilted them over the fire, making sure not to incinerate the animals by inserting them directly into the flames.
As I watched the crabs' struggle slow and their shells change color, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I was instantly alert and on my feet, axe drawn and ready to fight. Staring back at me was one of the deer-like creatures I had seen before, staying perfectly still and meeting my gaze. Its body was covered in undulating line patterns of darker brown fur on an off-white base coat, and its ridged horns twisted forwards into six sharp prongs that faced approximately thirty degrees upwards from its flat looking direction. It looks more like an antelope now that I think about it, I realized, just with horns that curve forwards and split like a deer's. In fact, wasn’t there a species of antelope with those features?
The gaze that the animal was giving me indicated caution, but not cowardice. I took a step towards it and the deer did not move. Another step, and the deer began letting out a low warbling noise. I froze in my tracks, preparing a number of possible moves in case it decided to charge me. If I can kill it and smoke its body, I can have rations for at least a week, I thought hungrily. I took another step and the deer rushed me. I jumped backwards and rolled to the side to evade the charge, but the deer stopped short of my initial position and kicked the ground. We stared at each other once more and the deer growled, then it bounded off into the forest again at a speed that I had no way of matching. Next time I need a spear, I thought as I dusted myself off and walked back to the fire.
It turned out that the crabs were more like large spiders on the inside, which is to say that the amount of edible matter in them was smaller than I would have liked. What matter there was agreed with my mouth quite well, but I held off on consuming the whole batch until near sundown in case they turned out to be poisonous like the tubers were. In my spare time I went out and found more flint, crafted a spearhead, and then affixed it to a roughly-straight stick to create my new weapon. The spear was about one and a half meters in length and after some shaving and fine-tuning with my axe it was balanced well enough to be thrown.
At sundown I began the killing of the crabs in batches of five. By the time I had finished the final one I felt quite full and also tired. Crab shells were strewn all over my campfire site and my hands were filthy, but I didn't care. Checking my heads-up display I saw that the green bar was filling up more and now sat at just above half. When I split the green bar mentally, more of the sub-bars were filled up than before, though none was at a full value. Different nutrients maybe? I wondered, could this flesh actually be genuinely biological, not just a cellular approximation of living flesh? That could explain some of it. Infiltrator bodies had flesh that certainly looked and felt identical to the thing they were imitating, but in reality their organic parts were made of artificial organisms using xeno-nucleic acids that required less nutrition than their biological equivalents.
My mind tired again, and I found myself heading back to my shelter bush as my body's internal temperature began to dip. The strange sleep impulse that I found myself saddled with was so powerful and insidious, worming its way into my behavior like it belonged there. I thought back on all the times I had mocked warbreed who had been killed due to falling asleep at inappropriate times, and wondered if the experience was similar for them.