Primal I (3)

Oh gears… I was NOT ready in the least!

The next few days would be a string of disasters the likes of which I couldn’t help but wonder how I still managed to have a heartbeat, much less actual life and most of my limbs. First I’d started off trying to make smaller hunts, looking for things of a smaller size than I was and maybe grabbing them up for myself. I’d whipped up a pretty competent sensory array from what I’d had to work with, basic audio and visual of an acuity about equal to my original human senses, only with more of them.

I figured that would be good enough, wanting to streamline my calorie burn and essence compiling. Apparently just the act of trying to compute growth outcomes for various designs took a pretty hefty chunk of processing power. It presented a pretty compelling reason why Zerg tended toward larger sizes for their optimal capabilities, essence processing itself became an easier task the larger you were and thus more able to direct non-essential calories and processing capabilities.

Which is probably why I literally had not seen the strange Blade tailed Lizard centaur thing as it uncloaked itself to swipe you down the moment you’d actually finally made a catch of one of those smaller lizard like things that tended to wonder about. They were a common locomotive post larval form as far as I could tell, with a tendency towards being both herbivorous and none too bright.

I’d lost the arm in that ‘fight’ such as it was.

And it was only the first such mishap in my wonderful new life.

Again and again I’d almost score a kill when some ambush hunter would find its way out of the bushes and either kill-steal or nearly kill me in the process. After the tree shark… thing... I’d all but given up. My stomach rumbling with need for fuel, and my very being ringing with an almost addicted need for freshly composed essence. Though that second one felt a bit more like me missing my Laptop and cell phone... ok a lot like it, without those things I found my attention drifting back to the sequences of Essence and the possibilities of modification which I could be making, trying in my head to work around the gaping gaps in my understanding that stood between what I wanted from my new body.

And so I decided to take a slightly different tract.

I only had so much Biomass and metabolic energy to work with, so I slimmed myself down just a bit more, and started to concentrate more clusters of olfactory and visual sensory apparatus to help make up for my lack of capability in composing more efficient and complex ones, then with a shameless heart, I began to go sniff out carrion.

Yay Scavenger route!

I supposed I could have felt worse about it, but the fact was I was already unreasonably hungry, and more than a little bit unhappy with my initial choices. I’d wanted to be all fancy, well… dammit fancy didn’t fill your belly. It was almost shameful just how quickly my nose cottoned on to the sweet complex fragrance of something recently dead.

I followed the wonderful scent; what I found was… weird, at best.

What I found was a single carcass, a strong looking almost lupine predator, its body arrayed with spikes and strange flowing fronds that seemed almost akin to feathers. That in itself was not particularly strange, at least not to me at the time, what was strange was the fact that it had no signs of having been bitten at by a larger predator, only the slashes which marked the point at which it’s  organs had been pierced and damaged.

And all around it was perfectly cleared, almost completely a circle, laid out with stones and sticks, the occasional stick staked down into the ground.

It felt like something sacred.

My head couldn’t help but scream ‘Trap’ every step of the way, watching closely as I edged closer. I still feel stupid about this, getting even as close as I did, but hunger and reason were not particularly compatible companions. I soon found myself staring, hidden among the tree fronds as I was, wondering if I could manage to grab a chunk and get away with it.

I almost tried...

Only the interruption of another, louder creature nearby kept me from going for it. The newly appeared Zerg was stout and piglike in form, its head almost akin to a small battering ram as it bored its way through the underbrush, headed deliberately for the Carcass as it knocked aside the stone ring in its rush to grab the meal before it.

I didn’t even see the moment when what looked like a tentacled wolf crossed with an angry Alligator dropped down from the trees, vicious fangs flashing out as it snarled and flung the bladed tentacles which lined its back against the pig-zerg’s flesh. I watched in fascination as the tentacle whipped and slashed out, practically skinning the creature alive.

Well… shit…

That could have been me.

I slunk back into the shadows, hunger temporarily abated via the intense stomach wrenching sensation of FEAR which gripped me like an ice cold hand. Still, hunger found its way back, worse than ever before as I could smell the pig-zerg’s blood. Eventually, curiosity overcame commonsense as I looked again at what had been the squealing zerg’s fate in the face of its wolf-like killer.

Again, I found myself surprised. The pig, for all that it had been flayed alive, had not been consumed, instead left to die a slow, painful death as it tried to drag itself along the forest floor, away from the site of its brutalization. I looked back at the ring of stone and sticks, fixed once more with barely a scuffle mark to show that they’d ever been disturbed. I didn’t know if it was still a trap, the pig now on the outside of the circle as it tried it’s best to limp away, but the hunger in me rose at its sight, my lost arm throbbing with anticipation as I considered the fact that I’d be unlikely to get this opportunity again.

I threw myself forward, slamming my spike rimmed arms into the thick, expose carapace of the Pig-Zerg’s head, smashing and dazing it with the unexpected armour breaking force. The flayed Zerg tumbled from its feet with a surprised bleat, already slow from the multitude of lacerations which covered its body. I came in again, not relenting as the creature cried out, flashing large powerful tusks in my direction as it blindly tried to get its bearings.

I wasn’t about to let it.

Again and again I slammed spike lined arms and armoured fists into the creature’s body, each blow landing wild but with a concentrated flurry of action.

One, two, three, one, two, three… my arms blurred as I kept up the assault.

It came as a surprise when the thing pushed up, slamming it’s dented face into my chest, using its superior bulk to smash me aside in a desperate attempt to flee. But there was no escape, my incredibly awesome legs bounded into action, throwing my body into action as I closed from behind, slamming all three of my arms hard against its hind legs, smashing the joints, even as the force of my launch sent me tumbling like an idiot after landing that grand slam.

Hunger, fear, and an overpowering sense of homesickness washed over me like a wave... spurring me into action as I rose up from my prone position. The hog was still struggling, pulling itself along on smashed legs, tenacity inherent in its every remaining motion.

I snarled... something primal, something fierce... something angry… something hungry… something scared...

One arm grabbed on to a broken leg, its counterpart missing as the other two rose up, and began to slam forward. Again and again and again, I smashed into flesh, bone, and carapace, smashed, and smashed, and smashed until the creature moved no more, not even the last groans of its passing having registered as I’d beaten the life right out of it.

I sat there.

Staring.

Still.

My hands soaked in vital fluids as my chest dry heaved.

I’d never been a violent person. Attracted to violence in some ways yes, a student of the way violence was applied out of a certain sideways fascination. But the act of taking this life with my own fists, visceral, and raw… burning with hunger. I couldn’t help the sick sinking sensation. In my own, old life, I found it hard to raise my fists in conflict...

This had not been hard.

… my head spun with emotions I could barely even name.

I licked my beaked mouth, three part jaw parting in a mingling of anticipation and personal disbelief.

That didn’t last long as the sound of a hunting predator or two seemed to begin to dominate the underbrush. Already there were others after my prize even as I regained my bearings. My prize and my own delicious ass if they could score both with minimal difficulty.

However I remain adamant that these are some bloody AWESOME legs that I cribbed off of my Incubator. It took me a moment, and few tried to balance myself right, but my legs didn’t fail me at all, as I launched myself and the heavy carcass into the air with me, landing on them with a powerful shock, then throwing myself forward, again as I tried to get to a nice spot where I could eat in peace.

That never really happened of course, the smell of blood keeping every other predatory bastard on my tail even as I was forced to eat the Hog bit by bit, gaining the material content I needed in order to heal up from my injuries. And when it came to Essence, well apparently the hog had some nice little additional adaptations to its facial carapace that would be applicable to my own shelled sections, as well as some nice sensory suite upgrades which I’d desperately needed.

That night I barely rested, mind cycling though my actions as I’d slain the other Zerg.

Food.

It was food. Nothing more.

No... I couldn’t fool myself like that. Couldn’t afford to.

The fact of the matter was, blundering pig or not, I’d killed another sentient creature that had been desperate in the attempt to preserve its own life. Yes, sentient. Most Zerg were likely to be after all. Intelligence was just one of those adaptations that I didn’t particularly expect to be uncommon. The moment anything got its hands on that particular upgrade it would have shifted the entire super evolving ecosystem to take on that trait or die to it, whether it was by various creatures getting a taste of something that had it, or that creature that it became such a success that it’s offspring started off with it into various niches.

Zurvan the Ancient one alone made me suspect that it was at the very least a very OLD trait.

It helped a little, thinking about these things intellectually, even as I tinkered with the essence received from my lucky break. And even more than that, the additional body mass allowing me to build up more sophisticated systems within myself. Some things just needed a certain critical threshold of size in order to get them working, and now I’d managed to upgrade myself from the size of a rather large monkey, to the size of a small child.

Hunting over the next few days got better.

It was a the combo of the much more potent sensory equipment which I’d taken off the pig, and the much more general upgrades I’d been able to give myself by both examining its Essence code with a fine toothed comb to iron out little tweaks to improve my general cellular and bone structure. Small improvements over all, mostly borne out of combining things I already knew with things the Pig had known to get something slightly better than either of us had made in the first place.

The days rolled on as slowly I settled into a rhythm of hunting, combat and hiding.

Over the course of those days, I found myself exploring the world around me, curious about the grand forests of Zerus. It was positively fascinating, the parade of both greater and lesser Zerg which I came across, the creatures both familiar and Unique all at once as they filled the various available niches. Body plans that I’d seen a million times over back home cropped up, long limbed canid and felid forms seemed to be especially successful, combining all manner of traits and weaponry to intense and surprising effects.

I’d found all manner of flying, crawling, and fighting forms... right down to Zerg creatures which had taken up symbiosis with Zerus’ plants in order to take on a sedentary life. Hell Shells, as I liked to call them were almost weirdly prevalent throughout the environment with a very low amount of adaptive variability. They were essentially tree based Zerg bivalves that lived by luring unsuspecting Zerg in via essence resonance… essentially counterfeiting the complexity and power behind their essence to seem much greater than what they actually were, and then lashing out with barbed and blazed tentacles, as well as a range of other weapons which varied from Hell Shell to Hell Shell probably based on who they’d been successful in eating. Well that and their very, very Zerg weaponization of their young as a projectile quill attack that would insert Egg-barbs delivering their youth deep into sweet flesh.

Horrifying as always, though it seemed their young didn’t have the uber metabolic boost that your ‘mother’ had managed in her offspring, and thus creatures tended to wonder off far and wide before either succumbing to the attack, or eventually figuring out how to either take them out or kill the organisms which nested within them. Clusters of the things cropped up practically everywhere.

They’d become my favorite food.

I’d further enhanced my armoured knuckles, moving some of the spikes directly onto the flat of the fist then arranging each of them into a three part pattern which would reinforce every strike with armour shattering proficiency while disrupting the same from happening to the very armour they were nested inside.

From my legs I’d taken the twitch muscle design and tweaked it for maximum impact performance and used that as the basis of my new arm muscles as well. All the while providing slots where my long thin fingers could fold and unfold from the hand in order to avoid damage from combat and still be useful during tree based mobility.

Hell Shell tentacles had become the basis for my brand new tail even as I took the sleek Bug/Salamander look and continued to run with it, and refining the essence of it had been relatively easy since my kit was almost hilariously well specialized for getting in close to the sedentary creatures past their powerful defenses of tentacles, harpoons, and other more esoteric weapons and cracking them open with minimal work.

I almost felt bad with how little I felt bad at eating them... knowing they too were probably not unintelligent despite their life style.

Days turned into weeks.

But for all my success… I was still lonely.

I spent every night dreaming of home.