Fleabag E-Book

SomeoneToForget

• Herausgeber: Podium Publishing
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Fleabag
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 777

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A lone wolf cub struggling to survive mutates into a creature possessing unpredictable—even human—abilities in this grimdark fantasy adventure series.   Somewhere in the toxic Bone Pits, where mechanical nightmares roam, an emaciated and wounded young wolf clings to life. Wracked with pain, driven by instinct, it crawls across the subterranean landscape, avoiding the unnatural horrors that dwell there and seeking sustenance while fending off rats, insects, and other vermin stalking it as prey.   Then it encounters a deity who collects human souls and is astonished to discover a wolf, as its species has been extinct for centuries. The god spares the wolf, bestowing the wretched beast with the means to survive until it eventually acquires the power of heightened intelligence and the ability to alter its physiology, turning into a shapeshifting monstrosity.   Part of an adventuring party scouring the tunnels, the elf Emhreeil was injured and left for dead. Blind and with broken limbs, she suffers in unbearable agony, waiting for her body to quit—or for something to devour her. When the wolf finds Emhreeil, it pounces on the opportunity to learn human speech from the pitiful being incapable of protecting herself.   Now, Emhreeil is the wolf's de facto companion as it struggles to escape the Bone Pits, dragging her through the twisted labyrinth and fighting the vicious predators hiding in the shadows. And with every battle, the wolf evolves in self-awareness and cunning, mutating into a creature that nature never meant to breed . . .   The first volume of the hit LitRPG adventure series—with more than a million views on Royal Road—now available on Audible and wherever ebooks are sold! 

Leseprobe

FLEABAG

– BOOK 1 –

SOMEONETOFORGET

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from Podium Publishing.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2023 by Theodoros Zapris

Cover design by J Caleb Design

ISBN: 978-1-0394-4356-3

Published in 2023 by Podium Publishing, ULC

www.podiumaudio.com

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In the lower reaches of the Bone Pits, under a hundred different bridges, pulleys, pipes, and walkways of steel, a solitary form lay limp on its side, breathing slow and heavy.

Its fur, once remembered in fading memories as a light shade of gray, was now a sickly sheen of green and black, matted and glued together in squishy clumps by the toxic sludge it’d trudged through to find something to eat.

Its eyes, a beautiful shade of hazel gold, were hazy and unfocused like faded glass. One of its ears was stuck flat to the top of its head by dried waste, and the other was twitching around, trying futilely to listen out for predators. Pus and brown-green chemical sludge would occasionally drip out of said ear, down its neck, and puddle on the floor one viscous drop at a time.

Its muzzle was marred by thin lined scars, infected and trying to scab over. Its nose was dry, unusable, unable to smell anything but the burning stench of waste and acid. Its lungs burned with every breath as if scrubbed with sandpaper. Fleas and ticks marred its numb body, draining it of life one day at a time.

An adventurous rat about the size of the canine’s leg wandered closer, curiously sniffing at a hind paw. It opened its maw, ready to try and chew through skin—

And then a siren blared out from above, red light flooding the small corner, and the rats gathering around the canine’s limp form scattered, squeaking as they dived in rusty pipes or squeezed between shifting pulleys.

The red light shone down, illuminating the canine’s slowly shifting ribs and angular, starved frame. The animal moved a little, struggling to lift its head. Slowly, sluggishly, it rolled onto its belly, legs still limp under its body. Despite the incoming danger, it could barely muster enough strength in its cannibalized muscles to position its legs under its torso.

The thunderous booming of machinery and gears grew closer, and the canine slowly managed to lift itself up, legs shaking like twigs about to snap under pressure.

Slow, jerky steps carried it up the stone steps one at a time as the sounds of rushing liquid and shifting gears echoed down the tunnel. Mere moments after it dragged itself up the steps, a big portion of the metal walls in the back and front of the room slid upward, a veritable tide of factory and two-legger waste rushing past, a river of filth.

The canine didn’t turn, stumbling forth as pipes, latticework steel walkways over sheer drops hundreds of meters deep, and cobbled alleys flitted past in a fugue.

It was dying. It knew.

Too weak to hunt for food. Too weak to take it from others.

So it stumbled forth, a dragging specter of fur, skin, and bone. One paw after another, eyes blurry with tears. It was too weak to hold its neck up, snout almost touching the ground.

Green-gray smog covered everything around it as it walked, the factories above all venting their fumes into the pits, the smell forever etched into its sensitive nose. It might have been stumbling toward the unknown for minutes. Might have been days. It couldn’t tell. Eventually, the smog was left behind, and the orange-red artificial lights of the pits were exchanged for the soft yellow of light crystals.

It simply followed the sound of life, not wanting to die alone.

It walked until its shaking legs could take no more, and it stumbled before collapsing on its side.

Sounds filled its ear and movement filled its eyes, incomprehensible, directionless. It was too exhausted and lost to process anything.

As a two-legger walked through the alley, he paused and moved his foot to slowly wedge under the canine’s frame, lifting its body effortlessly and quickly shoving it aside to lie against the alley wall. The two-legger shook his foot in disgust, then turned away.

“Fuckin’ fleabags everywhere … ”

His footsteps faded.

Time passed.

People walked past it by the dozens, sparing it nothing more than a pitying glance at best; a disgusted grimace at worst.

Unconsciousness consumed it.

When it woke up, the streets were emptier, shady figures in cloaks and metal face masks being the only occasional passersby.

It didn’t move. It barely even breathed, uncomprehending eyes staring at the gray, squeaking creature sniffing at its snout.

A pang of pain shot through it as the tiny mouse decided to start its feast from its nose, and its malnourished jaws reflexively snapped open and shut with strength and speed borne of desperation, rage, and fear.

For a few moments, the canine sat in silence as it kept its jaws clenched with whatever meager power it could muster, its taste buds too burned through to recognize the taste of copper as the mouse squirmed and twitched between its canines one last time.

Slowly, lethargically, the canine struggled to its feet, leaning liberally on the cobbled wall to its side. With great effort, it tilted its head back and swallowed its first ever kill like a snake, not bothering to chew.

No sooner had gravity adequately assisted its weak muscles in moving its prey into its stomach did it let its legs fold out from under it, sliding back down on its side against the wall.

Its eyes fluttered shut, ready to fall into another exhausted nap.

Without warning, it felt something shift and unlock inside its mind with an almost physical sensation. Startled, its eyes shot open as it tried to get up, legs flailing and sliding across the ground for a moment as they buckled under its own weight, its body only rising an inch or two.

It stopped quickly and sat on the ground, swerving its head back and forth, eyes darting around the abandoned alleyway. After several moments of nothing, it relaxed.

Somewhere in the back of its mind, like a task put on hold or an errant thought saved for later, something waited. Yet, as much as the canine focused, it could not grasp the thought nor understand where it’d come from.

The short burst of adrenaline faded, and with it, most of its energy. A wave of dizziness turned its mind to fuzz, and as it placed its head on the ground, its eyes slid shut once more, hoping it wouldn’t be the last time they did so.

-System Access Requirement Reached.

\\ Minimum Intelligence Threshold Reached.

\\ Secondary System Communication Method Activated.

\\ Language: Carmeran

\\ Initializing …

-Species: Wolf

-Name: None

-Racial Skills: [Pack Hunter], [Quick Learner], [Devourer]

-Acquired Skills:

You have gained the Skill [Pain Resistance - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Infection Resistance - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Poison Resistance - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Corrosion Resistance - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Disease Resistance - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Restful Awareness - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Tough Skin - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Iron Stomach - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Magic Resistance - Level 1]

[Pain Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 1→ Level 17

[Infection Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 1→ Level 7

[Poison Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 1→ Level 12

[Corrosion Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 1→ Level 4

[Disease Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 1→ Level 4

[Restful Awareness] has Leveled Up. Level 1→ Level 2

[Tough Skin] has Leveled Up. Level 1→ Level 2

[Iron Stomach] has Leveled Up. Level 1→ Level 3

[Magic Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 1→ Level 4

-Acquired Traits:

Enduring (1/5): You have felt the chill of death multiple times and survived. You are slightly tougher.

CHAPTER 1

The Great Tower rang once, the deep sound reverberating downward through miles and miles of haphazard iron architecture, reaching even the deepest reaches of the Bone Pits.

The wolf’s crusted eyes slowly opened at the sound after a moment of straining, much to its own surprise, and for a moment, it simply lay there, unsure of what to do. Its imminent death was something it had seen as a fact, yet now, it felt better than it had in months. Pain still wracked its body, but it was faded, distant. Rather than each breath sapping its willpower with the searing agony of all its wounds, it was just … a mild ache.

Its breaths came easier, its thoughts were clearer, and the countless fleas and ticks that had attached themselves to it seemed to be having a harder time than usual tormenting it.

Out of curiosity, it shuffled its paws under its chest as best as it could—and pushed.

Besides a tremor running through its weak legs, they surprisingly obeyed. Moving them still felt more like commanding straining tendons rather than even a single shred of muscle, but it walked on regardless, confused yet cautiously optimistic at the sudden improvements it felt.

For a while, it simply followed the sound of nightlife with its single functioning ear, hoping it would run into some half-rotten garbage that no two-legger would eat. Odd barks, strangled grumbles, and melodious howls littered the more open and lively areas, dozens of two-leggers packed tight in buildings reeking of both poison and food at once.

Then, out of the corner of its eye, it spotted a flicker of movement in the shadows of an alley to its right, barely wide enough for a two-legger to walk through comfortably, with looming metal walls on both sides and about as long as two two-leggers were tall. It seemed to be little more than an architectural mistake, in the corner of which was a tiny dark spot on the ground that moved and twitched with movements so small it was nigh imperceptible.

It stopped, its ear straightening as it tilted its head.

Deciding that something that was so much smaller than even itself might be a good prey, it cautiously stalked forward, lowering its head and going even slower than it already had. The shadow of the sphere lights outside receded as the darkness embraced its gaunt form.

Only a couple meters away now from the small dark mass on the ground, the wolf recognized a familiar scene; one that it’d had many scraps with other strays over when it had woken up in the pits for the first time, having no memories of anything but basic concepts and definitions in its head.

A mouse lay dead against the wall, the front half of its body half eaten by a small group of armored six-leggers, each roughly one-fifth the size of the mouse itself.

Perhaps due to its extremely cautious approach, or perhaps because the mouse was in a corner, none of the armored six-leggers had noticed it approaching, too busy with their meal.

After a few seconds of judging distance and risk, the wolf experimentally opened its jaws, stretching them as wide as it could. It tilted its head a bit to judge how difficult it would be to down the mouse and the six-leggers in one chomp.

Maybe risky, but definitely possible.

The appearance of the six-leggers tickled at the back of its mind, and a word for them begged to be drawn out of the abyss.

The wolf ignored it, crouching low on shaky legs and prowling closer and closer, until a single lunge would be enough. It cared not for the minutes that passed or the rapidly decreasing mass of the mouse being speedily devoured by the six-leggers. Coiling its abused tendons and ordering its lethargic muscles to life, it lunged with an audible snap.

Teeth scraped against stone for a moment before they closed around its prey. An instinct in the back of its mind told it to shake its head—one which it suppressed, fairly certain its fuzzy mind would be unable to handle it and make it disoriented like last time.

So, it simply clamped its jaws as tight as it could, observing the singular six-legger which managed to escape scuttle away into a hole in the stone, the rest squished into a blob of gore along with the mouse in its teeth.

Then its eyes rose and gazed upon the dead end in front of it. Fear coiled low in its gut as it realized that there would be no escape if something cornered it.

With as speedy steps as it could manage—which weren’t speedy whatsoever—it retreated back to the street as it snapped its head back and ate, keeping its head tilted sideways to have a single eye on the entrance of the cramped alley.

Thankfully, nothing blocked its exit, and after a few moments of cautiously walking away from the scene, its tail hesitantly wagged just a bit.

It was utterly exhausted, both mentally and physically, and it was still horribly hungry.

But it felt like it had a chance. One of those giant rats might be too dangerous a prey to be worth the fight, but if it could move, it could scrape together enough food to keep going.

Instinctually, it knew that even its meager recent snacks should have filled its tiny stomach, but for some reason, it felt ravenous. It was a strange hunger, neither purely physical nor purely mental; some odd mix of the two.

Yet, the wolf was familiar with hunger, refusing the odd, risky urges its empty stomach pushed toward it.

Attacking a two-legger—staggering and stumbling or not—was a terrible idea.

As it wandered around, looking for a half-decent place to sleep, it had to stop and retreat increasingly often from incoming two-leggers, or squish against a wall as they passed, ready to bolt if they shifted their stance toward it. While some of those creatures had tossed scraps of edible food before, most two-leggers either stared it down with a strange, contorted expression that couldn’t be anything good, or a few outright tried to chase it out of their territory. Yet when the entire world was their nest, there wasn’t really anywhere safe it could go without any two-leggers around.

All the places devoid of two-leggers were full of brown-green toxic waste and the equally dangerous animals that gathered around such places. So it took the route of least danger, trying to seem as small as possible as two-leggers made noises at each other and mostly ignored it.

Many times over its short life, it had heard certain sounds be uttered by the two-leggers as they looked at either itself or some other kin. “Mutt,” “fleabag,” “stray” were the most frequently repeated words, yet try as it might, it couldn’t recreate them nor understand why they used such complex and differing noises to alert each other to the presence of canines.

All of a sudden, a realization struck the wolf.

It was ever since it had seen—or more accurately, felt that odd dream of ideas, thoughts, and concepts yesterday, that it knew what it was. That it was different. The others of its kin were by all accounts very similar in build beyond some small differences, but somehow, it knew that it was a wolf now, while the others were … something close, but not the same.

Somehow, they knew as well, or so it would seem as it looked back on their interactions. It would explain many things the little wolf had sat and wondered about when it was resting but unable to sleep, either due to a cacophony of machinery or due to pain.

Many times had it tried to ingrain itself into a pack, only to be chased out without a reason. One sniff was all it took for a curious kin to turn flighty and avoid it entirely, if not outright snarl and snap at it while retreating, as if the wolf was about to try and eat it whole despite the obvious size difference between the teenage pup and full-grown canines.

Yet try as it might, it couldn’t detect whatever it was the other canines had smelled on it, besides the usual filth.

Now, it finally had an idea as to why all its look-alikes recoiled at its presence.

It simply did not belong. It was alone. It always had been, its few understandings of social interactions and the world observed from afar, learned or remembered through unknown avenues, or inferred from base instincts. But the realization that it wasn’t just unaccompanied but well and truly alone, the only one of its kind in the small world it knew … that realization made its steps slow until it was simply standing in place, dazed.

A deep sense of loneliness made its chest tight, and hazy memories of sleeping in a pile with other wolf cubs were brought to the forefront of its mind. The feeling of warm kin against its fur, their breath tickling its ears, the rise and fall of their chests syncing up as if they were all one single entity, the warm feeling of contentment.

It never knew where those dreams came from, as all it had ever known were these streets, bridges, alleys, and sewers. But they felt real, and many times they’d comforted it when its mind was trying to soothe its worries over the encroaching clutches of death.

Its tail drooped low, and it resumed its wandering with low spirits, keeping an eye out for a decent place to sleep or any lucky scraps of food. Many alcoves, corners, and safe-seeming spots were mentally noted, yet most were too close to barrels of chemicals, pulleys, or various bits of moving metal—all things it had learned not to trust after it had almost lost its tail when it fell asleep on a gargantuan gear that started moving.

Much time passed, two-legger figures clothed in brown and various shades of gray hurriedly moving past and around it, their body language tense and weary. The wolf didn’t react to them too much, simply making sure to keep its eyes on errant pipes just in case the two-leggers were being cautious because something was about to break. Two-leggers were usually only scared of other two-leggers, and rarely ever bothered with the wolf, so it simply trudged past them. As long as they weren’t looking at it, two-leggers were more concerned with … whatever two-leggers did.

Its steps slowed, and its parched mouth begged for water, but it continued, ducking into smaller alleys in the hopes of finding a safe spot to sleep, where rats and mice couldn’t find it and try to nibble on it. Even if it wasn’t that sleepy at the moment, walking while digesting food felt oddly uncomfortable.

An idea popped into its head and was almost immediately discarded. It could try to bait the rodents by pretending to be asleep for another quick snack, but it simply didn’t have the energy to pretend. The moment it closed its eyes for more than a minute, it would probably fall asleep and wake up with another giant rat trying to chew through its fur like last time, and that just wasn’t a fight it wanted to take.

Although … maybe it could just … sleep in the open? Two-leggers hated rats and mice, and actively went out of their way to kill them. While the feeling of being exposed was—

The wolf’s train of thought faded away as it walked out of the alleyway, noticed the sudden lack of walls around it from the corner of its eyes, and froze with its paw midair as soon as it raised its head, eyes wide open.

In front of it was the largest open space it had ever seen, stretching on for hundreds of meters in every direction. Hundreds upon hundreds of two-leggers were flecked throughout the massive crescent-shaped open area, somehow looking like a small number in comparison to the sheer amount of space on display, little more than moving dots from its position. The wolf craned its neck upward, for the first time feeling its eyes actually strain to make out the details of the countless black lines, towers, latticework bridges, and elevation platforms covering the open area like an unintentional dome of mind-boggling complexity and scale.

Giant sphere lights were connected to thin metal towers which punched through the crescent metal platform and reached up to the bridges and walkways above, seemingly created for the sole purpose of lighting and connecting various hanging wires from one place to the next. A metal rail framed the platform’s edge to prevent two-leggers from falling into whatever was below, and dozens of small structures were dotted throughout the gargantuan area, with bright signs covered in odd shapes. Two-leggers would walk to those odd structures with a half-open front, gibber at each other for a bit, then be given things to carry away, either in bags or directly placed on their back pouches.

The things they were given varied wildly, from odd, glowy things made of tiny bits of metal somehow stuck together, long, sharp metal claws, oval-shaped glass bulbs with glowing liquids inside, metal containers with caps on the top, incomprehensible tiny bits of metal, and there was one especially large and sturdy-looking building which seemed to give out nothing but dried … green … somethings. They looked oddly organic and familiar, but it had never seen anything quite like them before.

Its first thought was that the two-leggers might be making a new nest as it finally let its paw hit the metal underneath, tail involuntarily wagging in excitement as it gazed around an entirely different world in wonder.

The streets and alleys it knew were all so … small, all of a sudden. All the miles and miles of snaking tunnels, toxic waste pits, alleys and bridges and factories—all of them now seemed like only a tiny part of a bigger whole. One so big it was almost scary to imagine.

To the wolf’s right, the metal crescent abruptly stopped at a certain point, cobbled stone replacing it with giant streets twice to thrice as wide and multiple times as long as those it was used to traversing through. In a daze, it walked forth, eyes drinking in every detail it could.

Even something as simple as the streets that led to the platform were so foreign. Whereas below they were uneven, cobblestoned lines—like snakes that changed width with every few steps, moving in dizzying spirals and the occasional rare straight line in between—the roads here were perfectly straight between the buildings framing them on either side, smooth and flat and completely linear; almost blocky.

The two-leggers were more varied as well. More colors adorned their odd coverings. Their gait was more certain, less wary than it was used to.

Without even realizing, its tail had started to wag like crazy as it moved skeletal legs fueled by nothing but excitement, staring in complete disbelief at the colossal tower that the crescent platform was framing.

Its eyes felt like they were burning just trying to open wide enough to see the whole thing from one end to the other, even from more than a hundred meters away.

It watched through the iron framing and glass as its innards shifted, lowering a giant platform to the level above them before a bridge extended outward to connect to the level above. Even further above, another platform performed a similar action, barely visible through the smog.

Some kind of … transportation structure? Or maybe it was building stuff?

As if the world was reprimanding it for admiring something made by its betters, a two-legger chose that exact moment to let its eyes wander to the wolf from where he was talking to one of the shopkeepers, an expression of disgust taking up his face. It raised a finger toward the wolf, whose eyes were still nailed to the tower in wonder.

“[Spark Bolt].”

If it weren’t for the sound of continuous, deafening pops that accompanied the spell, the wolf wouldn’t have had enough warning to instinctually dart forward and to the side away from the loud noise, its weak legs buckling the second it tried to lower its stance and stop its momentum, making it yelp as it tumbled to the ground in a heap of tangled limbs.

After a moment of panicked flailing, the wolf scrambled to its feet and dashed back to the alley it’d come from with a hurried glance back at the man who’d shot the spell, leaving behind a surprised pyromancer and an irate shopkeeper.

“Are you stupid, kid?! No fuckin’ magic in the market!” a voice barked behind it.

Familiar alleys welcomed it, and after fifteen or so seconds of running, it turned its head to see if it was safe. Seeing nothing following it, it wheezed and coughed through still-burnt lungs before stumbling to a dented iron crate sitting discarded in a corner. No sooner had its shoulder touched it did its limbs crumple like wet paper, falling asleep before it even hit the cobblestones.

CHAPTER 2

The wolf dreamt.

Images, concepts, names, functions, and definitions flashed rapidly before its eyes. The gray mice from before floated and flashed across its sight, and like an unraveling tapestry, split. Its fur, soft and insulative, was broken down, a combination of oily guard hair on top and a thick underfur beneath. The guard hair kept moisture from reaching the skin, and the underfur acted as an insulating blanket to keep the little creature warm.

Then in a dizzying flash, it split again. Its nails separated, and he saw the strands of biological material which created them. It split again, its organs, their purposes, even some names like liver and heart being embedded into its mind, knowledge so smoothly placed it felt like remembering something it had forgotten rather than something it had just learned.

It split again, its muscles breaking apart, its bones splintering to reveal they were made of some sort of hardened connective tissue, its ligaments, joints, and eventually, its brain, all being shredded apart and understood on an intrinsic level.

A vague notion of choice hung over its half-aware mind, and for a moment, the dream turned lucid. Its mind scoured through the options presented, yet none but one felt like it would be even remotely useful. Much like in a dream where it had no notion of questioning what was happening, it simply moved on, the consciousness retreating back to dormancy.

The six-leggers.

Cockroaches.

The information was far, far more vivid this time, the names flashing in its mind along with every function and placement in a giant burst of information which nearly woke it from its slumber as it lodged into its mind.

The compound eye, the antenna, the metathorax, mesothorax, the abdomen, stylus, cercus, walking legs, wings, hind legs, mid legs, forelegs, cerci, maxillary palp, tibia, tarsus, femur, coxa, the abdominal segments, and the trochanter, all the knowledge of their functions and their placement on the cockroach was absorbed. And then the cockroach split, its insides unraveling, its complexity almost painful to its mind to comprehend.

The ventral cephalic trunk in its head, interwoven around the dorsal cephalic trunk, the thoracic and abdominal spiracles, the lateral, dorsal, and ventral longitudinal trunks that ran down its sides, the atrium, and a few dozen more organs flashed by in its mind, all fitting in such an incredibly small being with the utmost efficiency.

The choice hovered once more, and the dream turned lucid.

The amount of things this creature had at its disposal were numerous, and for a moment, the wolf simply thought of them all in awe.

Yet, the unspoken question it was brought there to answer still hovered. And the wolf hesitated, looking through all the organs which worked like bricks, one supporting the other, all useless without each other.

All but two. The cerci, thin hairs connected to an internal organ that could sense even the slightest of changes in wind speed and direction. These hairs could not only easily blend into its own fur—the cost of the new organ was low. Of course, by what metric or how any of this was happening, it didn’t know, but seeing as it was a dream, it was not particularly questioning of its circumstances.

Then, it turned its focus on the antennae, organs which would connect to the brain and sense vibrations. They would probably look strange on its head, unless it used the much more effective antennae to replace the whiskers on its snout. With but an errant thought, it also removed the pain receptors from them.

The choice solidified in its mind, and its consciousness sank back into sleep.

Yet at the same time, it didn’t. Sleep was once a complete darkness, coming and going in the blink of an eye, yet now the wolf was in an odd limbo between being awake and asleep, able to feel the sensations of its body, able to hear the sounds around it. Like a flitting, momentary dream, sounds and sensations were combed through and discarded if they were not alarming, and despite the tiny amount of mental capacity such a thing required, the wolf felt safer than it ever had in its sleep.

In what felt like little more than a moment, footsteps neared, and the wolf’s subconscious jolted it, its eyes snapping open. Despite the usual drowsiness that usually followed its sleep, no such thing was felt, its mind and body instantly awake and aware. It turned, seeing two small humans staring at it, and it jumped to its feet with far less pain and effort than what such a motion should have required. Not to say it was negligible, but quick movements were but a far-off dream just two naps ago. Even its burnt lungs seemed to be healing, slowly but surely.

The two two-leggers seemed to be paying a lot of attention to it, their eyes wide open and focused on it, so it bent its legs into a half crouch, ready to bolt. The humans were small, but the wolf still barely reached their chests. The half-crouched stance made them stiffen instantly, the small male reaching for a blunt pipe that it had tucked into its skin layers.

“Holy shit, it’s still alive,” one of the humans breathed out.

The wolf didn’t know what the sounds meant, but the soft tone was sometimes used by the nicer humans who’d throw some edible waste at it, so it tilted its head as it tried to understand their intentions through the contradictory sounds and body language. Which was something two-leggers did sometimes, it had come to find out.

“I mean, we could still kill it. It’s got a lotta energy compared to how it looks, but it doesn’t seem tough. And it will be a good meal, at least for us. Just um … distract it, and I’ll hit it on the head real hard, okay? Don’t get bit; it looks sick,” the male human whispered, touching the quivering, smaller human female on the shoulder.

The wolf didn’t like their body language, from the way their muscles were tensed to the nervous way they observed it. While keeping its eyes on them and an ear behind its form, it quickly backtracked, keeping its body diagonal to the pair. The humans hesitated for a moment, then the thin male stepped forward aggressively, only for the smaller female to grab his arm and shake her head, saying something the wolf couldn’t catch with its single functioning ear pointing in the other direction.

The humans backed away as well, and the wolf’s muscles relaxed ever so slightly as their forms fled around the corner of the alley. Looking around, it realized that it was, once again, completely lost. Two-legger nests were too large and too complicated for it to have the mental capacity to map out anything more than a few spots, but simply by finding downward-tilting roads and alleys, it could at least figure out how to go to the only place that had any food for it, which were the lower, dirtier bits of the human nest.

Part of it hesitated to return, remembering the rivers of thick burning sludge that separated the lower parts, yet it was too weak to go anywhere but there. Two-leggers were oddly wasteful, and while rare, it wasn’t entirely uncommon to come across dead bodies that had been flushed down from the upper parts of the iron nest. The variety was fairly large, ranging from winged creatures to two-leggers to canines or scaled creatures. The small, squirming ones eating them were even a decent snack, if a bit repulsive to its instincts for some reason.

Maybe once it grew a little, it could hunt rats. Or an isolated two-legger, though it wasn’t sure if two-leggers were protective enough of their nestmates to hunt it for doing so, so until it knew, it would probably continue avoiding them.

With slow, careful steps, it slowly stalked through green-and-yellow-tinted streets, under hanging signs and barking and howling two-leggers, squeezed through metal fences both bent and cut through, crawled under tightly pressed pipes several times larger than itself, lapped up some dripping water from one of the leaking pipes for a few minutes and rested, then continued until it found what it was looking for: one of the giant pipes that led directly down to the green-brown rivers, diagonal, huge, and hanging over a complicated network of abandoned automatic factories, walkways, bridges, and cables.

After a bit of climbing and a small jump, it got on the pipe, tail tucked between its legs. It began to slowly, slowly inch its way forward on the downward-sloping pipe, the eroded nature of the metal the only thing giving its paws any friction and preventing it from slipping off into the increasingly lifeless darkness underneath, lined with cold, dead metal.

Its instincts screamed at it, turning its limbs stiff with the fear of the giant stretch of air and cables separating it from the walkways underneath. Yet, it still inched forward, knowing it had to use whatever meager energy reserves it had to get to the only feeding ground it had proven at least a little successful in.

Eventually, the pipe connected to a giant metal rectangle drafted onto a cylindrical pillar of steel that reached up and down beyond where its eyes could see, and the wolf had to jump to the metal walkway underneath to continue. If only it could grip the metal bars the two-leggers used to descend to the burning rivers or use one of their hanging boxes that went up and down on one of the iron cables, its journey would be little more than a field trip. But it couldn’t.

Bracing itself on legs quivering with fear, it powered through the instinctive fear of the massive height underneath the walkway, reasoning to itself that it had taken such drops a dozen times before. Yet, the temptation to walk back up the pipe and take the long, long way down through the snaking alleys and stairways was still there.

But it knew that was the wrong choice. Its legs hurt, its deaf ear was slowly becoming itchy and attracting more and more tiny flying insects, its limbs felt weak and wobbly, its throat felt so dry it was worried it would start cracking like dried dirt, and its functioning ear was so swamped by the constant clanging, humming, and shrieking of the shifting metal in its infinitely vast surroundings that it was starting to feel a little dizzy.

The thought of getting dizzy when it was sitting over a death drop was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

With a timid shuffle that made its fur crack and split from where the sludge had solidified on its back, it moved to the corner of the pipe, and with a yelp of fear, allowed itself to slide off onto the walkway underneath.

Its legs crumpled like wet paper, and the walkway moved for a moment with the familiar rattle of failing metal, filling it with cold terror.

But even as the metal railing kept wobbling in its loose casing, the walkway stabilized. With a mild pant to its breaths, the wolf slowly got up from its bruised rib cage and walked down the winding staircase that curled around the metal tower like a jagged centipede, bits of broken and bent railing the only thing stopping it from falling off to its death from a single misstep.

Small, flat metal platforms were placed in front of heavy iron doors every few feet down, allowing it a moment of relatively safe rest on its journey downward. The metal towers usually reached around some sort of two-legger gathering spot, and from there, it was only a short walk to the burning rivers.

An entire hour of cautiously walking down the stairs, resting, and repeating later, it finally reached the bottom.

A few two-leggers were drifting around the giant open area around the base of the tower, all covered head to toe in extra skins, with glass and metal coverings over their faces. Some of them were checking up on some of the two-leggers made of rock, waving their hands around and touching their glowing bits, repairing the erosion and cracks, before ordering them around to continue whatever it was those things did.

The wolf really disliked those things. They were shaped like two-leggers, but narrower and shorter, their limbs able to shift and extend with a sound like grinding gravel, and despite moving, cleaning drains, and hauling waste into the burning rivers like living beings following their instincts and orders, they weren’t alive.

They were just moving rock. It made no sense, and it was just unnatural.

But they weren’t dangerous. The few times it had seen some living things in the area attack them, they’d just ignored the animal until it gave up. So the wolf stalked around the edges of the square, avoiding the scant few two-leggers hanging around and repairing their deformed stone duplicates, and sought to find a place to rest for a while.

In less than a minute of slow walking, the sounds of life and activity were drowned out under the cacophony of shrieks, groans, and rumbles of the surrounding machinery. Bent pipes leaked foul-smelling liquids into the cobbles. Exhaust pipes snaked toward the walls of the pits and shot upward, hidden behind a mess of scaffolding and wires from which the humans repaired and maintained them.

Barrels of dangerous green liquids were thrown haphazardly around every corner with space, waiting for a stone two-legger to come pick them up and empty them into the metal boxes that emptied their contents into the burning rivers. Some pipes would expel a fine, odd-smelling mist with a menacing hiss, which the wolf avoided out of sheer caution. The humidity of the environment was staggering to get used to, but after a few minutes, it grew accustomed to it.

It found a spot relatively free of danger, hidden behind some sort of segmented cylinder surrounded by spiraling wires, and crawled under the half-hanging mass of cables which ran into it, appreciating the warmth of the odd machine. It fell asleep almost instantly despite the dirty water soaking into its paws and chin.

In what felt like little more than a few seconds, a crackling sound woke it from its sleep, and a menacing sound somewhere between a hum and a buzz made it panic, scrambling out from under its cover to run away. After it moved away a few meters, it turned and stared at the cylinder where the sound was coming from, the volume getting higher and higher.

And then, with a deafening crackle that made it yelp, arcs of white shot out from the top, flashing to the water with speed it couldn’t fathom.

And straight to its paws, still partially submerged in dirty water.

A pained sound like a high-pitched yowl ripped itself out of its throat as its muscles seized, feeling like a thousand needles stabbed themselves into its hide and dug into its bones. Despite its seizing muscles contracting and tightening without a goal, it managed to jerkily stumble and fall away from the puddles of water—partially due to how little meat it had on its bones—and it half crawled, half stumbled away from the scene with its tail tucked between its legs, which were barely responding to its orders, still twitching and buckling.

After sitting panicked for a few moments as the shocks faded, it snarled, its head turning wildly to see what had hurt it. After several moments of nothing, it relaxed a bit, its senses not picking up anything dangerous nearby besides the still oddly buzzing machine.

The wolf was about to continue, to go and find something to eat or just find some spot to finally sleep uninterrupted for just a few hours, when a certain sound pierced through the now faint buzzing in the background of its grimy path.

The squeaking of a rat.

It turned around, ready to bolt, but after a moment of confusion, its eyes wandered back to the machine.

In one of the puddles, a small rat was suffering in much the same way the wolf had, trying to walk yet twitching and rolling instead, the white arcs ravaging its soaked, tiny body much more than they did the wolf.

Despite the adrenaline in its veins directing it to run away, it slowly stumbled back to sit next to the puddles, its movements a little more even and controlled by now, and sat on its haunches, watching the rat, waiting for it to either stop moving or grow so exhausted it could eat it. After a minute or two, the rodent barely twitched, its chest pumping up and down as it hyperventilated.

After five minutes, shallow breaths and weak twitches were all which signified the rat was still alive. The wolf crept forward, wary and uncertain of if it would get shocked again, and slowly put a paw in one of the puddles. A minor shock burned through its nerves as it yelped and jerked back a bit.

Its curiosity overcame its hunger for now, and it moved back to the puddle, very slowly putting its paw next to the water.

Nothing.

It then slowly put its paw in the water, and despite being ready for it, the wolf was still startled by the shock, retreating a couple steps back as its mind struggled to understand why this water looked normal but momentarily took over its limbs and made them hurt. It stomped its paw on the ground a bit to get rid of the numbness, and it was fine again.

It moved to another puddle, putting its paw in it.

Nothing.

Puzzled, it tilted its head, trying to find some pattern to what was going on.

It took more than a few attempts as it ran around the area, shoving its paws into water with increasing fervor to try and understand what was going on, until eventually, the machine crackled again, this time much quieter, and white lines visibly flashed down from its top down to its base, spreading throughout the water that touched the metallic base bolted into the cobblestones.

The smell of charred rat confirmed the rodent was definitely dead, and after a moment of staring, the wolf moved to a puddle that was isolated, carefully putting its paw into it.

Nothing.

Then, with extreme hesitation, it put its paw on a small puddle connected to the water that had the white lines running through it a moment ago.

Pain shot through its front leg, and the pup snarled in response as it jerked back, experimentally moving the limb back and forth in the air to gain back the feeling. As its eyes settled on the rat, it couldn’t help but linger on the mystery of the sparky water.

After a couple seconds of thought, it realized what was happening.

Or rather, a rough approximation of it.

After bracing itself on its bad paw, which had been shocked a bunch, it leaned forward over the puddle and quickly put all of its strength into a swipe with its good paw, managing to batter the semifried rat out of the water with only a few minor shocks to its leg.

After another minute of waiting to make sure no more sparky water was on the rodent, which was about as large as its entire head, it poked it with its paw, and judging it safe, quickly chomped down.

In little more than a few bites that felt amazingly easy, it devoured the rat, fur and all, and started licking the blood off the floor. Smacking its jaws shut with a meaty clack of satisfaction, it turned and walked off into the dimly lit undersides of the mechanical behemoths above, wondering why its teeth had felt almost as much resistance when biting through the rodent as they did when biting through air.

CHAPTER 3

With a jaw-popping yawn, the wolf settled to sleep, tucked next to a small series of heating pipes that kept it blissfully warm. A few moments later, its consciousness faded.

You have gained the Skill [Electricity Resistance - Level 1]

[Electricity Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 1→ Level 2

The wolf dreamt once more, seeing the rat it had devoured be deconstructed piece by piece in its mind.

Yet, there was no real difference between a mouse and a rat besides size and tail structure, so there was little to see, and its choice in the dream was that the rat had nothing it wanted.

The odd lucid dream faded, and for the first time in the last couple days, nothing appeared to disturb its sleep besides the usual annoyance of the flying little things. Hours and hours passed, and eventually, it opened its eyes, feeling well rested for what must have been the first time ever. It had no frame of reference to know how much time had passed, no sun to indicate, but it felt like it had spent the better part of an entire day sleeping, based on its internal clock.

Wasting no time, it got up and walked toward the faint sound of rushing liquid, a strained sound that barely slithered out from under the all-encroaching cacophony of pounding metal. Its paws pounded against humid, grimy stone at a steady trot, feeling solidified waste tickle against the underside of its paws from where it had fused into the mossy stone and tainted it brown green. The noxious scent of fumes invaded its nose, which was probably both good and bad, as it meant its nose was healing from the burn, but it also meant it could smell the foul scents of the rivers again.

Meaningless shapes of uncountable varieties and dizzying complexity surrounded it, but besides a cursory glance to ensure nothing was about to break and hurt it, it continued through them, the sound of rushing liquids getting closer and closer. It ducked under a pipe so hot it released faint white wisps of steam as the surrounding moisture settled on it, and a forty-five-degree-angle incline met its eyes, which turned into a far less steep angle a few feet down and met in the center with another identical one on the other side. Right where the two met, a canal lined with lead directed the vast majority of the river, with bits that overflowed usually sliding back into the canal from the downward-trending walls.

How it knew what a canal—or lead—was, it didn’t know, but questioning things had never given it anything but a mild headache, so it left it alone.

Dead and rotting bits of blackened meat were strewn all around the edges of the canal, interspersed with dissolving, unidentifiable materials of less organic origin. Some parts of the river frothed and churned as if alive, the liquids interacting and reacting with each other in a cacophony of sizzling, boiling, and light screeching when the most volatile met the lead. Glowing green insects buzzed all around the rotting corpses, undulating and covering them from top to bottom, carrying with them the pungent miasma of decay.

Bits of slowly evaporating green-gray foam were strewn about on the edges of the canal, and brown slugs the size of the wolf’s front legs were gathered around the foam, hooked tentacles slithering out of their undersides and prodding at their surroundings as they walked, occasionally finding some organic material and dragging it under themselves to dissolve it in mere moments.

Some slithering vines twisted, their needled leaves piercing into slugs that wandered too close by before the vines contracted and wrapped around the squirming creatures, after which too much glowing plant matter was covering the slug to see what was going on.

The wolf tilted its head as it stared at the plants, finding them oddly familiar, and after a few moments, it remembered the organic, dry-looking green stuff that one of the metal buildings above was giving out to the two-leggers, back when some human had thrown orange sparks at it.

It continued observing the river as it turned its body and walked up toward the source, hoping that the droppings near the top would be less dissolved, rotten, and less dangerous to eat. It wasn’t exactly sure why, but the closer one was to the top, the less dangerous the river’s liquids were. Maybe the liquids simply didn’t have enough time to grow and become stronger; it wasn’t sure.

That also presented the problem of less scavengers and more predators lurking about.

In an area like this, the only things that could be around the more dangerous rivers and survive were either scavengers, like the things it saw below, or stronger creatures that had adapted to the environment, like those brightly glowing chubby things that jumped around everywhere, the eight-tentacled things that stuck to the bottom and waited for things above to come so they could drag them under and consume them, or the utterly terrifying behemoths that were those scaled quadrupeds with maws twice as large and long as the wolf’s entire body.

It couldn’t even hope to compete, so it was simply going to see what kind of things were around the river, and if they were dangerous, it would return to one of the bridges that went over the canals and go look for a less risky choice. There were many burning rivers in the nest, and it didn’t have any desire to risk its life in a futile fight against the river dwellers.

After a couple hundred steps more, it confirmed its suspicions and backtracked in disappointment, hoping the next river was less scary.

It eventually found one of the arching bridges and crossed over the canal safely, only having to avoid a single stone two-legger on its trip to the next canal. Unfortunately, from just a glance, it could tell that this river was only a tiny bit less dangerous than the last one, so it moved on to the next canal, its legs screaming for rest, its tendons feeling sore somehow.

Thankfully, it was rewarded for its efforts, the next canal being about as safe as it could reasonably hope for. Besides a couple of those dangerous plant things in the corners that it knew how to avoid and a couple slugs, it was fairly safe. The flies would burst into green burning liquid if the wolf hit them too hard, so it had to approach some of the dissolving organic bits with caution and slow steps, lest it jostled the things too much and they burned another hole through its fur.

With cautious steps and a single upright ear, it crept forward, checking the washed-up bits of scrap food it could find. A couple brave rats, dissolved down to their hind legs and covered in flies, some strange black winged thing that was half eaten by the—

The wolf stopped as it realized it suddenly had a name for the flying things, out of nowhere, so naturally that it barely noticed as it used the word inwardly.

Flies.

Deciding not to dwell on it, as per usual, it resumed walking. Not wanting to waste the food while it was still there, it slowly moved its snout to prod one of the half-eaten rats, making the green glowing flies scatter, some of them trying to settle on top of it and its foul-smelling ear.

As soon as it was sure little to no flies were still attached to the rat, it gripped it between its teeth, barely feeling the pressure on them, and briskly turned around, slowly increasing its speed until it was trotting and then lightly running away, making sure no flies impacted it. After a couple moments, it turned, watching the scattered flies go off to eat the winged thing.

It didn’t particularly mind the loss. It had eaten more bits of rats than anything else, and it knew they were at least somewhat safe to eat. It had never eaten one of the flying things.

Although now, it suddenly wanted to. Both its mind and body wanted nothing more than to turn around and charge through the flies, grab the odd black winged thing, and eat it whole.

Instead, the wolf chomped down on the half-eaten rat, flinching slightly as the familiar burning settled in its mouth and throat. It had lessened significantly, but it still hurt.

The first time it had chomped down on a rat from around here, it had been covered in so much burning stuff from the flies that its entire mouth and throat had been rubbed raw and bleeding, and it had almost choked on its own blood when it’d gone to sleep, barely able to breathe through the pain.

Lessons in the two-legger’s nest were often as dangerous to its life as they were helpful.

It repeated this process a few times, but besides the tiniest of scraps, most things were too rotted, too dangerous, or too unknown for it to try and eat, despite the angry snarling of its stomach.

Still, with the total amount of about an entire half of a rat in its stomach, this had been a great day when it came to food.

It decided not to stick around too much in the area, both because some of its worst memories had been created down there, and because it was far more dangerous than the places where two-leggers were, despite more food being available.

It trotted up, backtracking to where the giant metal tower met the ground, and after about half an hour, it was safely nestled underneath the staircase it had descended with.

For some reason, the two-leggers rarely if ever used it, preferring their moving metal boxes on the inside of the tower, but it wasn’t about to question why two-leggers were so insane they’d ride a moving box of metal rather than walk down like normal beings. Especially when it gave it such convenient shelter.

It closed its eyes, fully ready and willing to sleep away its digestion and go back to find a few more scraps of food soon.

[Restful Awareness] has Leveled Up. Level 2 → Level 3

A short while later, it woke up from its nap and headed straight for the canals, taking a slightly different route that used the two-leggers’ streets, hoping it would help it circumvent or entirely avoid things like the sparky water from before. Its left ear had started to hurt enough for it to be noticeable, but there was nothing it could do about it, as any attempts to scratch it only made it hurt more.

It got a little lost much sooner than it expected, the sound of rushing liquid too drowned out to be distinguishable, much less with a direction that the wolf could infer with any accuracy.

With a low grumble of annoyance, it turned the corner and instantly stopped moving, tilting its head. A two-legger lay collapsed on the ground on its side, the glass mask the two-leggers wore cracked open, most of the glass missing entirely. The two-legger was groaning weakly, turning over on its stomach with slow, lethargic movements, its breathing ragged as it tried to curl its limbs inward.

The movements and motions of something dying were more than familiar to the wolf.

It had gone through them itself multiple times.

So it moved to the side, eyes nailed to the two-legger as it tried to find the best spot to wait for the two-legger to die, its limbs and heart basically vibrating with excitement at the potential of a huge meal.

The two-legger managed to curl its bottom legs under it and extended its upper legs to touch the ground, paws flat as it coughed—a wet, sickly sound. It put its bottom leg’s knee against its own chest, supported it with its upper paws, and staggered upright, much to the wolf’s dismay. It leaned on the wall for a few steps, each one slower and more unstable than the last, until its knees buckled, its grip on a pipe turning its body to drop on its back.

The wolf stilled its tail, which begged to wag, and slunk forward, as still as it possibly could be. The two-legger’s motions were oddly reminiscent of the rat, it thought, watching its rib cage expand and contract with heaving breaths, shallow coughs shaking its entire body.

The wolf moved up against a wall and sat on its haunches, slowly becoming more confident in the two-legger’s inability to harm it—so much so that it sat on its butt just a mere couple feet away, silently watching, its eyes boring a hole through the two-legger, and its right ear pointed up.

Two minutes passed without much change, and the wolf started feeling nervous as time passed and the human refused to die, wondering if one of its kin would come and take away its meal. Not only that; the more it waited, the higher the chance some stone two-legger would come and save the human. It didn’t know the capabilities of those things nor if they would even bother helping the two-legger, but it definitely didn’t want to find out.

After a shuddering breath accompanied by a dry-sounding cough, the two-legger’s head lolled to the side, its eyes settling on the wolf, who simply stiffened and went even more statue still than before.

A halting series of tiny coughs came out of the human, something humans did when conversing happily with each other, yet the sound was oddly bitter. The wolf didn’t know what the two-legger was trying to say, nor did it care too much, just hoping it would die already without it having to risk its safety by getting close and biting it.