4 FR13ND! 4 FR13ND! 0H G00DN3$$, 47 L4$7! H0W 3XCI7ING! I H0P3 1 M4K3 4 G00D 1MPR3$$|0N!

- Unknown origin, detected across multiple broadband radio wavelengths. Recommend immediate allocation of resources- indication of previously recorded BAHAMUT-type pattern manifestation.

MATERIAL CONSUMED

MATERIAL CONSUMED

MATERIAL CONSUMED

ADAPTATION ACQUIRED: BONE DENSITY

ADAPTATION ACQUIRED: TWITCH-NERVES

ADAPTATION ACQUIRED: MUSCLE DENSITY

Eating sludgelings? Truly nausea inducing. The bone trees? Each bite had to be chewed down to the consistency of pasty sand, and then swallowed painfully.

Somehow, eating the meatballs is actually worse. They taste raw, for one thing- none of the other options feel like they should be edible, and there’s something of a defence against just how horrific the process of consumption is. But the meatballs are made of meat, and that somehow makes it worse. They’re fatty, greasy, and taste like the worst parts of a chicken and the toughest parts of a cow mixed into one weird abomination of flavor and texture.

It’s fucking horrific, and I am so glad I only needed to eat a few bites of one before I managed to grab an adaptation from it.

If I had to guess, consuming more will probably have further results, which is great, but I cannot eat another bite of these things. The act of chewing feels disgusting, like my jaw is all misaligned and full of too much saliva, but that’s nothing compared to the feeling of swallowing, of having the materials pass through a strange tube into a churning, weird mass in my stomach. The name does bring up a memory of my “character sheet”, though- while most of my organs are just called “Fleshling Organ(x)”, under my “DEGUSTATION” tab, there’s a different name: the CYCLIAL DIGESTER, whatever that means. It feels… uncomfortably like there’s a washing machine spin cycle going on in my lower torso, which is not fun to feel.

Either way, the Adaptations were the cherry on top. Forcing myself to eat the… thoroughly disgusting matter and gain what advantages I could from it helped- I feel heavier, but the added muscle density counteracts the bone growth added, making me feel overall faster and more fluid. The “twitch-nerves” take it a step further- every movement feels like it’s happening at my maximum reflex, shooting out to respond so fast that I actually have to hold back the reaction more often than not.

None of them felt pleasant to acquire, but it’s fine. I’m not me right now. Or… I am, but… not? Either way, I’m… feeling it, but it’s not relevant, because it’s only unpleasant and I’m going to get out of here. I am going to get out of here. So the fact that I can feel my nerves squirming and itching beneath my skin, the fact that my limbs feel alien and heavy and move like something else is following my instructions, the fact that I can feel my guts moving and squirming like snakes and crawling things and-

It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. Thinking about it right now won’t help, so we put that in a box for later. Later.

Especially because I’ve got other priorities in front of me.

There’s a cave.

Or maybe a tunnel, hard to say. It’s dark.

The sludgelings, as far as I can tell, mostly just wander around blindly, grazing on the scab-gravel and the bits of blood and mess left behind in it. Like rabbits, if rabbits were acidic instead of agile, and ate exclusively carrion and blood rather than plants. So really not a lot like rabbits at all- the point being, they move randomly, and don’t ever seem to stop moving, at least not in the… fuck, almost half a day I’ve been here.

The meatballs, on the other hand, are a bit more mobile. They roll across the terrain, occasionally grabbing the ground with assorted flesh-fibers and throwing themselves over a hill, and while they don’t move in groups, they do tend to cluster vaguely in each other’s direction, crossing paths on occasion. It took a while, but I took my time, and considering they are literal balls of muscle and tendon with no easily discernible features like, say, eyes, it wasn’t actually that hard to sneak up on them.

Or to head towards the areas where they become more and more common, until I eventually ran into… this.

The cave.

The grass around it is packed down to the earth, mixed together into a gross mud with meat-juice and dried blood and hair, and there are clear and distinct trails through the grass where other meatballs have rolled out in the past. It’s quiet for now- one or two will wander out on occasion, but never more than once an hour or so, or once in a half-hour at most. As far as I can approximate, anyways- there’s no sun that I can find, and I certainly don’t have a watch, but going by feel, it seems right enough.

Notably, the meatball that rolled out most recently is currently in my hands, being pulled apart into tendons and fibers, meaning that I’ve got some time to try and sneak in before the next one comes along.

It’s something new, and new is inherently scary, and in this case, inherently a danger to me… but it’s less of a danger than trying to go for the mountains and running into the being again. I can kill a meatball even without my newest improvements, and being in a more claustrophobic space doesn’t really change my taxes thereof- that other creature, whatever or whoever it was, killed me like I was nothing at all.

Even with my latest new tricks, I don’t really fancy my chances just yet- but I still need to go into someplace new, especially if it means that I can find some new information or a new way out.

And, hopefully, it’ll be a chance to push my latest changes and see just how much they affect things.

Eating weird things on the ground for ADAPTATIONS sucks.

Using weird meat-bits to build an exosuit with my SYNCHRONICITY kicks ass.

Standing back up to my full height, I stretch my limbs and run through a systems check on my current loadout.

While I’ve kept my right hand free (or my first right hand, I guess), the three other hands I’m currently wielding each have a new weapon in them, of varying style. For some reason, I can’t quite seem to build anything inanimate- no matter how simplistic the tool I generate, it still reads as a “Symbiont”. Case in point:

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

In my left hand I have my best approximation of a dagger, wrapped around my fingers with its own twitching insect-limbs, wrapped in muscle-“leather” and ending in a sharpened edge of bone, is identified by the system as a “Jittering Claw”. The two club-swords I put in the hands over my shoulders (I tried my best, but turns out that making swords out of bone bits is actually really fucking hard unless you have a lot of time) are each classified as “Jointed Claw-Clubs”, each a little under a foot and a half long and poorly balanced, but sharp-edged along where I sharpened and broke the pieces and wrapped them in muscle and acids.

It’s the fourth invention, the one I’m just now putting the finishing touches on, that really stands out.

SYMBIONT ACQUIRED: EXOMUSCULAR FRAME

Wrapped around my body tightly enough to feel uncomfortable, awkwardly winding around my joints and muscle groups, is a bunch of exposed, raw muscle fibers, pulled apart and then rewoven and fused by sludgeling acid and blood-gravel into a facsimile of an exoskeleton. Adding to my twitch-nerve adaptation, it pulls right alongside me, acting like a living being and reacting to certain pressures by flexing in just the right ways to help me run faster, hit harder, and lift more.

Now, technically speaking, I am not so much an expert on biology that I can just design new muscle groups to wear, but the nature of the Symbiont seems to do a lot on its own. That, or my SYNCHRONICITY does more than I thought, which is saying something, because I am quietly terrified of the fucking thing. As I formed it around my body, it sort of… adapted? Shifted into place to do what I wanted it to do.

And now… all that’s left is to go forward.

My little blood cell nudges my foot as I stand, perfectly still, staring down into the tunnel.

It’s ok. It’ll be ok. I need to do more, to find my next steps, to explore the things I don’t understand in the hopes that I’ll finally find some kind of direction to move in besides the massive glowing letters in the sky’s demands.

But it’s a black tunnel, going down into a hill of dried blood and meat, the roots of bone-trees poking out of the dirt around its edges. And I am in a strange place that has already hurt me quite badly.

But I need to go forward.

So I pet my pet blood cell, and I put the fear in a little box to deal with later, and I walk into the tunnel.

It is… distressingly warm inside. And it gets dark very, very fast.

I crouch-walk forward, quiet as I can be with five arms and muscles that jump at the slightest command, feeling the warm wetness of my newfound “pet” bumbling along and poking me in the heel every now and again. The tunnel gets tighter as it goes along, but never quite so tight that it actually touches me, even as I crawl along it. I feel like an ant, diving into a hive, walking through tunnels of other ants down into the dirt, except this dirt smells only of blood and muck, of old exertions and dried copper, and it shifts and drips in turn as I balance my many limbs along it.

And it is so, so quiet.

I had expected to eventually hear the sound of meatballs again, congregating and doing… whatever it is they do when they’re not rolling semi-aimlessly across the fields. But there’s just… nothing.

Look at me go, huh? Wander into a cave in the fleshfields and get surprised when it’s not what you expected.

The humor helps a little. Counteracts how quiet it is. It doesn’t do shit for the darkness, but I’m… limited on that front. Not much that I can do except keep moving forward, and potentially find a nest that I can harvest to-

ADAPTATION ACQUIRED: SCOTOPIC VISION

I am suddenly and viscerally reminded of every time I’ve been to an eye appointment as I feel something in my pupils move.

You never realize how weird certain things are until you actually feel them for the first time, and as my eyes dilate way, way wider than I’ve ever felt (than I knew I could feel at all, frankly), I am reminded that the human brain does a very good job of helping people ignore their internal mechanisms.

I am not currently wearing a human brain.

I inhale sharply as I feel something touch my leg, twitch-limb and additional arms turning my weapons down towards-

A blood cell, bumping up against my heel and rubbing itself there like a cat.

I let out a breath, low and slow. Keep it quiet, keep it still… but I reach down and pet my little companion anyways.

I don’t know what it is, or how an ancient game cartridge generated it in this place, and I certainly didn’t enjoy the process of feeling it infect me… but it’s nice to have someone that cares. Even if that someone is a weirdly large blood cell.

“I’m ok, buddy,” I whisper, and find, to my surprise, that I am. A bit, anyways.

My eyes still feel weird, but the inside of the tunnel is just bright enough to see by. If I put all of my “points” into ADAPTATION, I wonder what I’d become- three of those red little pyramids that show up on my sheet is apparently enough to spontaneously mutate my eyes just by being in the dark, so pushing it further must be…

Terrifying.

And a little intriguing.

I stare down the tunnel, and-

Oh.

Scotopic vision. That’s low-light vision, I think, not like, echolocation or anything. I left the light behind me a good half an hour ago, easy. Pupil dilation only works if there’s at least some light still available.

The walls are glowing.

Even now it is very faint, but it’s there, a bright carmine mixed with a sort of… oily color, like spilled gasoline, glows from the walls. What I mistook for roots of the bone-trees above when I first crawled in, I now recognize as growing up from below, not down from the surface, and they put out just the tiniest bit of their own light.

And there, in the dimly lit red of the tunnel, I see what I’ve been missing.

Meatballs.

It feels… weird, to call them something “funny”, considering where I am now. They’re not sequestered in a side-cave or frolicking- they’re right here.

Embedded in the walls, in little divots that blend them almost perfectly with the fleshy, gooey walls of the tunnel, are at least a dozen of the abominations. Turning to look behind me, very slowly, I see more of them, and more, going back all the way until the tunnel bends out of sight- dozens, maybe hundreds of them, all perfectly still.

I breathe very quietly, and go to take a step backwards.

Pop.

One of the little divots flexes, and out of it pops a tightly-wrapped bundle of muscle fibers and tendon. It lands on the floor, rolling side to side- and then goes very still, right in the middle of the hallway.

That’s it. It doesn’t move, doesn’t unfurl like the rest of them, doesn’t move closer- but the threat is explicit.

They know I’m here. And they could’ve emerged and torn me apart anytime.

When I was a little kid, I watched some ants fight in the playground. Apparently, their anthills were too close to one another or something, and they entered a territorial dispute. One thing that stuck with me, and which brings to mind that same memory now, was how they fought.

Ants do bite. If they’re one-on-one, those big mandibles of theirs will absolutely chew through the joints of their opponents until one, or both, are bleeding out on the ground.

But if there’s a lot of them? If an enemy is outnumbered, or outmaneuvered by a pack of one anthill or another? They don’t really bother with biting. They just use those big mandibles of theirs to hold the invading entity in place, and then pull.

These little bundles of flesh… they don’t really have teeth, or sharp edges. There’s not much room to throw themselves at me down here.

But they are literally made of muscle fibers, and there are very, very many of them.

I am not surrounded by four or five enemies on an open bit of dirt. I am a half hour away from sunlight down a dark cave that bleeds if I step too heavily, and there are a lot more than five members of an anthill here.

I do not want to know what it would feel like to be literally torn apart, down here in the dark.

The tunnel ahead remains clear, even as the single ball of muscle sits perfectly still behind me, surrounded on all sides by hundreds of others just like it.

I take the threat, and invitation, in the spirit they were intended. I turn, and keep walking deeper into the tunnel.