body manip

I bore down on Gilgamesh, body growing as matter flooded in from above, adding to my mass and providing structure to my assumed form. The hand I swept at Gilgamesh was massive now, easily large enough to grasp a man’s head like an apple, and my claws were wickedly sharp—would have been impractically so, in fact, had I been anyone else. While honing a blade to a razor’s edge certainly had its advantages, primarily in that it allowed one to put more force behind less area, there was also the issue of fragility. In comics, there was a lot of talk about absurdly thin blades that could cut a hair in two or slip between molecules or whatever, but even with Remnant’s most advanced engineering, something like that would crumple like, well, aluminum foil, assuming it didn’t simply shatter at the first sign of resistance. Aura could help with that, but even with its reinforcing touch, it would never match to durability of larger weapons. Fighting with such a thing was just asking to be stripped of your weapon at a crucial moment.

But matters changed when you could make them out of unbreakable materials—or, at least, things that acted as though it were unbreakable. Thanks to the Gamer’s Body, none of the damage I took actually showed on the surface; whether my flesh was pierced, my bones broken, or even if my head was removed, it wouldn’t actually seem to harm me until—presumably—I lost my last hit point. In addition, thanks to my various skills, my biology was…warped, to say the least, and the modifications it was able to support were equally unconventional.

It was something I embraced, here and now.

Gilgamesh lifted his left arm to block my coming strike, the limb bulging slightly and taking on a more armored appearance just before my claws connected. I felt my talons crack and break against his hide, sometimes pulling up the flesh around them in the process—but none of that showed and my claws raked his carving swallow marks into his forearm. I let the products of Venenum spill from the venom sacks in my knuckles as I struck, spraying the wound with something corrosive—my failure to create the alchemical legend that was the Universal Solvent, still potent enough to liquefy organic matter.