Muscles

Alice was so tired that she was barely conscious when she finally reached the first house occupied by the fluffy yellow birds, their chirping calls echoing from the openings in the upper floor of the building, leading her on like a very off-key siren’s call.

Without an instant of hesitation, she forced her weary legs to move once again, her body on the brink of collapse as she tiredly climbed the steep stairs, took a few steps in the small corridor of the first floor and finally entered the first room she saw, too tired to acknowledge anything but the soft-looking mound of moss that grew on the right side of the room, dropping her bag onto the floor and immediately falling asleep on the spot, completely ignoring the startled cries of the room’s current occupant as it tried to fend off the perceived predator from its precious eggs, the noise it produced gradually increasing in volume and shrillness until, after a few minutes, it suddenly stopped, never to come back.

That night, Alice snored for the first time in her life.

The young woman only woke up many hours later when her neck, bent in a very uncomfortable position against the overfilled silken sack she was using as a pillow, started painfully cramping up.

With a groan, the sleepy girl attempted to adjust it in a more comfortable position to keep snoozing for a few more minutes but, instead of relief, the movement was accompanied by a collection of incredibly loud cracks coming from her vertebrae.

Upon hearing the noise, a wave of irrational fear filled her hazy mind and an intrusive thought dissipated any sleepiness she could have still had.

Did I just break my neck?

Thankfully, that brief moment of confusion was soon dashed by the veritable storm of painful sensations from all over her body that invaded her mind soon after, a gasp of pain and relief escaping her lips when she attempted to move her legs and arms and felt the agonizing soreness of her overworked muscles.

“Nope, I’m just a dummy,” she muttered, wincing as she pushed herself upright with her arms and leaned her wrenched back against the mossy wall, goosebumps appearing all over her skin when she felt the cold moistness of the vegetation starting to seep through the silk of her dress.

Brushing off the shivers, she started slowly straightening herself, ignoring the many cracks coming from her bones as they popped back into their normal position.

Once she was able to actually move her torso without feeling like an octogenarian grandma, Alice switched her focus to her lower limbs, slowly massaging the stiff muscles in her legs with very dubious results, her thighs and calves rioting every time she attempted to shift her weight around.

“I definitely messed up yesterday,” she chuckled to herself between each gasp of pain, her eyes slowly moving across the room, casually inspecting it in order to distract herself from the agonizing soreness she was experiencing.

As she was looking around, however, her eyes finally landed on the large nest of twigs she had ignored the previous night and, at last, her mind took stock of the silence permeating the room, comparing it to the fuzzy memory of a very loud, yellow bird screaming out of its lungs to scare her away from its nest.

Uh.

A sense of unease slowly growing in her mind, the girl risked another twinge of pain from her muscles to prop herself up against the wall and peek inside of the nest, a bit of relief immediately easing her nerves when she noticed the half a dozen of perfectly intact eggs that lay in its center.

If it were a monkey, I would have been attacked while sleeping and there wouldn’t be eggs. Maybe it went to get some food? Do birds do that when they are brooding? Mhhh, maybe it’s warm enough to move away for a bit or something. Whatever the case, it seems to have accepted me as a temporary room—

Before she could finish the thought in her mind, however, the sudden sensation of something smooth and dry slowly slithering beneath her skirt and along her bare thigh made her freeze on the spot.

Adrenaline immediately rushed through her body as she reached for her knife with one hand and attempted to grasp the creature through the cloth with the other, immediately hearing a muffled and startled hiss coming from underneath the silk.

Her heart hammering in her chest, she maintained a tight grip on the elongated body of the creature as it squirmed between her fingers and with the tip of her knife moved away the layer of clothes hiding it, her eyes widening when a familiar green snake stared right back at her with its large, purple eyes that seemed to burrow into her own.

“What the heck, why are you here?” she asked in a whisper to the snake who, instead of replying, continued its attempt to escape her grip, its sinuous body uselessly coiling around her fingers until, after a bit more struggling, it seemed to accept its current condition and simply raised its upper body to be at the same height as her head, staring straight into her eyes with an expression that, to a shaken Alice, seemed one of actual annoyance.

Surprised by the snake’s actions, she almost lowered her knife, immediately raising it once again in suspicion as she checked her mind for any abnormality, trying to find some kind of magical signature or toxin that could be influencing her thoughts in any way.

When she came back empty-handed and found the reptile still calmly looking at her with its slitted pupils, Alice finally relented, placing the knife on the ground and instead slowly extending her index finger until it was right in front of the snake’s snout, watching in surprise when the creature didn’t try to bite her and instead, only brushed her fingertip with its thin, forked tongue.

Can’t help it.

“Boop,” she said as she gently pushed her finger against the snout of the reptile, watching it recoil slightly and taste the air with its tongue before turning its head and staring at her with one of its purple eyes.

“What the heck, why are you not attacking me? It doesn’t make sense!” she exclaimed, astonished by the unbelievable behavior of the creature.

“Are you even the same one I healed yesterday?” she asked again, this time more to herself, as she lifted the creature and searched for the wound she had noticed the previous day, immediately finding the almost healed mark on its tail, right below a pronounced bump that stood out against its otherwise thin body.

For a second, she thought she might have missed some kind of tumor in its system but, after a bit of thinking, her eyes moved back to the empty nest in the room and to the unattended eggs inside of it, the obvious truth soon revealing itself.

“You ate the bird, didn’t you?” she said, slightly shaking her fist and watching the raised head of the snake bob up and down accordingly.

“You ate yesterday! And it was my alarm! And why the heck did you follow me? How?” question after question went unanswered, the little creature soon coiling around her hand and closing its eyes, completely ignoring the look of accusation on its captor.

I’m trying to interrogate a snake, she finally realized, a reddish tinge coloring her cheeks as she finally accepted the fact that her questions would remain unknowable mysteries and, instead, took her time to observe the slumbering snake, a small smile appearing on her lips despite her annoyance.

“You are pretty cute,” she finally admitted, “I guess it’s not going to hurt anyone if I carry you around for a bit… until you grow bored or I manage to find a way out I guess.”

With that decision behind her back, Alice finally stared at the sack full of cold, grilled meat that laid on the ground beside her, the smell of smoke and cooked blood wafting from the inside despite the bag being tied close.

She couldn’t help but drool a little bit at the thought of her breakfast.

“Right, better get to it.”

It was a very displeased Alice that silently stared at the large mound of food that lay on the recently-cleared floor of the room, a small fire made from the wooden components of the nest already crackling in front of her, ready to reheat the cold chunks of meat before she consumed them.

“I knew I was forgetting something,” she said after smacking her forehead a few times, sullenly staring at the numerous moist feathers and pieces of moss that covered every single strip of meat like the most unappetizing breading known to mankind.

She had messed up yet again.

While stuffing her back full of the food she had obtained and the strange objects she had found, the exhausted girl had completely ignored the previous contents of the bag, literally jamming everything together with the moss and feathers she had recently started carrying around with her as padding for her pillow, somehow not realizing that the soft and airy materials would immediately stick to the moist surface of the meat and get drenched in its juices.

“Dammit,” she murmured as she moved a tendril of Lumen across the strip of cooked monkey, consuming the feathers she had spent so long collecting and placing the clean food to the side, her mood souring the longer she went on with that sorry task.

“I guess I’ll try to find a way to create an actual pillow. Who knows what I could find in the ruins… if a chaise longue has remained intact, a pillow might too. We’ll see I guess. Can’t focus about it right now. I’ve got work to do.” She finally stated, taking the first warm piece of meat from the fire and immediately stuffing her mouth with it, the process soon becoming almost automatic as her stomach quickly filled with delicious, soon-to-be proteins.

Only when she felt sated did Alice stop munching on the food, leaving the rest of her supplies on the ground nearby and laying with her back against the fresh and humid wall of the house, taking a few deep breaths to calm herself for what was to come.

Her heart beat loudly in her chest and she felt scared and excited at the same time, ready to take the next step towards a new and improved form, eager to create what she had spent so long imagining and designing in her mind.

In some ways, every change she made to her body felt like she was moving away from her true self, from the world she had come from and from the people and things she had left there, slowly losing what actually made her Alice Desare.

At the same time, however, every new improvement allowed her to not only live but also thrive in that new and strange place she was stuck in, and she couldn’t help but feel good into her new body and role, able to change what she didn’t like and repair what was broken with a single thought of her mind, stopped only by her own knowledge and the limits of her magic.

Did that make her less Alice? She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t feel like stopping there while searching for an answer.

Her heart slowly resumed its normal beat and her breath gradually slowed down as the resolute biomancer closed her eyelids and gently sank inside of herself, her consciousness leaving her mind and moving into her own body, immediately heading to the digestive tract.

Alright. she said as she floated inside of her stomach, Let’s make sure everything in here is working as planned. I don’t want to start consuming more nutrients that I should just because I’m too hasty in my work.

Proceeding slowly and attentively, the determined girl carefully inspected her digestive system, using her Biomagical Instincts skill to adjust the body to her needs, making sure that the meat was being correctly broken down by her stomach acids and that the liquefied nutrients were being absorbed by the countless villi that coated the surface of her guts, soon establishing a gradual production and absorption of food that would serve her well as she worked.

Only once she was absolutely sure that everything was in order did she finally focus on her muscular system, visualizing every single muscle in her body and then proceeding further down into its structure until she could finally feel the way each fiber in each muscle contracted and relaxed, sending a multitude of signals which, together, formed a perfect map of her body.

Alice was able to experience the way her heart beat in her chest, continuously moving countless blood cells throughout her body and allowing them to carry the oxygen pumped by her lungs, their precious cargo ready to feed each of the skeletal muscles that eagerly awaited her orders.

Attached to any of the muscles she observed, she could sense every tendon and sinew as they stretched and strained to allow the right movements and to prevent the wrong ones, keeping everything in its correct place and never faltering while doing so.

In that perfectly planned concert of organs and tissues, however, Alice immediately noticed the only glaring discordance, observing in silence the way a significant part of her right arm threw the entirety of her body off-balance, grimacing when her enhanced muscles and sinew strained against their neighbors, pulling with too little or too much force and creating a vicious circle where the rest of the body lost its efficiency and incurred in preventable injuries.

Like in the fungal forest. She thought, thinking back of her dislocated shoulder and the way it had also managed to injure the muscles around it, even those not directly connected to her arm.

Each organ doesn’t stand in a vacuum, I should have remembered that.

Everything is connected and I need to change myself with that knowledge in mind.

It’s time to see if I’m able to do it.

Trepidation in her mind, Alice finally started reforming her entire musculature, proceeding by layers and commencing from the least-perceptible one.

The biomancer silently stared at the single fiber she had randomly picked between the many thousands forming a single bundle of her abdominal muscles, using her Biomagical Instincts to closely monitor the hundreds of long chains of proteins it was composed of and observing the way each one reacted to the constant stream of signals they received from her brain, watching them as they slowly contracted and relaxed accordingly, able to keep up with any request for long periods of time thanks to the slow but constant production of energy the cell could achieve throughout its period of activation.

That kind of fiber, however, was not the only one Alice could see in the vicinity and the girl soon found herself comparing its results with those of some of its neighbors, slightly different-looking myocytes that appeared to be much paler in color when compared to the first batch, their surface almost devoid of the capillaries that heavily irrorated the first ones with oxygenated blood, the way they worked as different as their appearance.

In the past, she had only briefly glanced at the differences of those two fibers which, throughout her body and in different proportions, formed every single one of her muscles, thinking them useless in the grand scheme of things and only recently realizing of their importance.

How quickly things change. She thought to herself, her discoveries of the previous day still crystal clear in her mind.

Despite its unconsciousness and the beating it had taken, the monkey’s muscles were perfect mounds of pale, rippling tissue, ready to unleash their surprising power the second it was needed, their surface composed of layer upon layer of thin myocytes that reacted explosively whenever a signal from the creature’s brain reached them, immediately burning massive amounts of sugars and sending that fast-produced energy along their proteinic chains, causing them to contract at incredible speeds when compared to her own.

Alice had seen and felt on her own skin the effect of such an energy, witnessing the effects of a power able to break bones and propel a creature at incredible speeds, giving it the strength to easily finish off an opponent within seconds.

Despite that, she had also seen the monkey pant and wheeze after just a couple of minutes of fighting, its muscles unable to sustain that power for a long time, its energy dissipating as fast as it had appeared, leaving behind a body in dire need of rest and nutrients.

She had won the fight for that sole reason.

Power or Endurance? It was never a question.

With that thought in mind, Alice let the magical warmth finally flow out of her reservoir and wash over her muscles, her mind set in a state of deep concentration as she carefully dissolved a large portion of those pale fibers and, over the hours, replaced them with the ones able to sustain a protracted effort without tiring, numerous hairlike capillaries soon extending from the veins around them and connecting to the new tissue, immediately starting to feed it the oxygen and nutrients it needed to work.

When she finally moved out of her trance and let her consciousness come back to her brain, the sun in the sky had already reached its zenith and was just starting its low descent towards the night.

Her magical energy was almost depleted after the huge effort she had undertaken and the resources she had stockpiled in the stomach had melted like snow in the summer, consumed by the cells to fuel their constant mitosis.

On top of her growling stomach, Alice couldn’t help feeling the differences within her body, the new way her muscles felt under the skin, how they seemed weaker but, at the same time, able to work for much longer, no trembling in her arms after keeping them extended and away from her body, the cells producing a constant stream of energy that didn’t seem to run dry.

On the other hand, she found herself unable to jump as high or swing her mace with the same strength as before, the weapon feeling much heavier now that she had chosen her path.

“I knew it would happen but damn, that’s still super strange,” she muttered to herself after she had swallowed the first mouthful of smoked meat, mindlessly munching on the food as her reserves slowly grew back and she got ready for the next challenge, the easiest one of the three she would have to undertake but also the one that would consume more resources than any other.

“Time to become Swolice,” she proclaimed to herself between giggles, hoping none would ever know that those words had come out of her mouth.

Since the second phase was simple but, at the same time, very labor and nutrient-intensive, Alice knew that she would need to work well not to mess up with her pacing.

For that exact reason, she had elected to remain conscious while she worked, her control of the magic enough for her to enact those changes without having to be inside of her body.

A long time has passed since I had to work cell by cell to repair an injury.

“You see,” she conversationally told the snake that was slithering along her right arm, “my muscles grow bigger and stronger whenever I use them, the fibers stretch and break but then they fuse with each other and become thicker and able to sustain more strain.” She explained, nodding in agreement when the snake turned its head in her direction and tasted the air before resuming its climb towards her armpit.

“Yes, you make a good point. That process does have its own downsides, mainly because I’m definitely not looking to become a slab of muscles by the time I get out of here. Thus, what I’m basically going to do, is get all the upsides of muscle growth while drastically reducing any of the downsides. ‘But how would you do it?’ You may ask if you weren’t a snake, Well, I’m basically going to straight up copy the muscle composition of a mole rat and then sprinkle a bit of Rocktopus on top of it!” she finally exclaimed, taking the soft hiss of the reptile as a compliment and gently patting it on its head with one finger before letting it continue on its path.

“I’m really losing it am I?” she chuckled to herself before growing serious once again.

Her plan should work but it wasn’t a reason not to be careful.

Despite the confidence she was showing, Alice had spent a long time trying to find a good compromise between strengthening herself and maintaining her current appearance, finally finding it in the muscular characteristics of two very different beings.

In the muscles of the giant mole rats she had been fed by the Spear Spiders, Alice had found a way to effectively double the amount of fibers that a single muscle could sustain, something that allowed those giant rodents to shrug off the effects of a cave in and to forcefully squeeze themselves out of tight situations without being crushed.

After that, she had only needed to obtain a way to counteract the obvious side effects of such an improvement—namely the obvious bulkiness of any enlarged tissue—finding it in the boneless system of muscles of the Rocktopus, immediately spotting the way its fibers seemed able to squeeze themselves together in a pinch, its size diminishing significantly whenever it happened, probably an evolutionary solution for such a large creature moving through narrow tunnels and small openings in the underground.

After that, it was only a matter of making it happen.

Alice carefully opened the flood gates of her well of power and let out a stream of magic that slowly washed over the muscles, carefully prodding the cells to produce more of themselves, feeding them enough energy to speed up the process and watching the main body of the myocytes slowly copy itself before splitting into two identical copies, a process that was soon happening throughout her system.

Despite its simplicity, however, the process wasn’t as painless as she had expected and Alice soon found herself being assaulted by an overwhelming itching that came from beneath the epidermis, her entire body squirming around as the muscles started slowly swelling up, pushing against the skin to obtain some much-needed new space and activating her nerves at the same time.

To make matters worse, the skeletal muscles weren’t the only ones touched by the changes and she could soon feel her engorged heart start pressuring against her lungs, an incredibly sharp pain coming from deep within her chest, as if something had stabbed her from the inside.

“Fuck, I should have thought this through,” she spat out between gritted teeth, her body constantly shaken by the twitches of her limbs, even her tongue feeling thicker and alien in her mouth.

Forcing herself to ignore that mix of horrible sensations, Alice crawled on the ground of the room, swallowing one or more chunks of meat whenever the reserves in her stomach were running dry but otherwise simply convulsing on the cold stone, muffled gasps of pain escaping her lips whenever a muscle twitched in a particularly unpleasant way or a nerve managed to connect itself to the new growth and sent a new shower of sensations to her overwhelmed brain.

The snake had elected to slither away soon after the start of the experiment and the afternoon had come and gone while her myocytes continuously split, the early evening finding an exhausted Alice laying face-first on the cold floor, her body sore and drenched in sweat, the large pile of food she had prepared now down to the last handful of morsels.

She, however, was finally done with the second phase.

After the last muscle had finally reached the size she wanted, Alice had taken the remaining magical energy and slowly started changing the way the fibers interacted with each other, carefully reducing the space between the different cells and then further compressing the muscles with a mesh of fibers that ran across their surface, binding the different fascicles of muscle and forcing them in their position.

She could already see her much more defined biceps pushing against her skin and she could no longer feel the painful pressure of her heart against the lungs.

She so wanted to check herself out.

Instead of doing that, however, she forced herself to ignore those strange sensations coming from her body, and tiredly inched towards the last pieces of food that remained, ignoring the nausea at the sight of more meat and instead swallowing every chunk of flesh after chewing through its stringy texture for far too much time, waiting for her reserves to regenerate for the last time.

In the meanwhile, Alice anxiously prepared her body for the final and scariest phase, the one that would bring the most serious changes.

Only after making sure that everything was working as intended did she finally check her magical reservoir, swearing under her breath when she found it only halfway full, the food she had stockpiled not enough for her needs.

She looked around the room for anything that could do in a pinch, ignoring the little voice in her mind telling her to eat the little snake that was sleeping a few meters away and instead focusing on the handful of eggs that still lay in the center of the empty nest, their mottled surface almost glinting in the last rays of sunlight.

“Dammit, fudge me and my stupid shortcuts, next time I’m exercising instead,” she muttered as she quickly reached for them, not allowing herself to think of what was inside of the eggshells as she coated them in a layer of Lumen and then popped them whole in her mouth, chewing just enough to break the shell and then letting the Lumen move the contents down her throat, trying not to puke in the meanwhile.

When the last egg had disappeared in her stomach, Alice brushed the tears away from her eyes, sat down on the ground and initiated the final part of her work.

Despite her efforts to remain calm, her newly-enhanced heart was still hammering in her chest as she opened her well of power once again, directing a small wave of magic to the many ligaments connecting her muscles to her bones, copying the silk-inspired structure of the tendons of her right arm and gradually replacing the weaker sinew in the rest of the body, taking her time with the reconstruction to make sure everything worked perfectly.

After that, the biomancer took a single deep breath and then simply let every sliver of magic she had available out of her well, letting the warmth seep into each one of the muscles in her body, soaking their internal structure with pure energy and slowly changing it into something new, her mind evoking yet another memory as she carefully guided that complex process to its end.

It was the second time she had entered Maath’s body but the sight of its inner workings still induced a shivering amazement in the young biomancer’s soul.

Alice had been staring for a long while at the mass of corded muscles hidden beneath the Spider Queen’s exoskeleton, watching the way the coiling bundles of fibers moved in unison whenever she shifted or utilized one of her remaining legs, controlling the incredible forces of her hydraulic system and turning them into fluid and delicate movements that almost reminded her of a dance, even more impressive now that she knew what those legs could do and become, the power they exerted as impressive as the precious material covering them and the shapes they could take with just a ripple of the Matriarch’s magic.

Unable to contain her curiosity any further, she had carefully pushed herself into the closest of the bundles of fibers, finding its internal structure to be a copy of the external one, its fibers spiraling around each other to strengthen themselves and even their proteinic chains slightly coiling around themselves, their shape much more capable to exert sudden and powerful strains without tearing and, surprisingly, without wasting too much energy in the process, the system incredibly efficient in its work.

She couldn’t help but be envious.

The memory disappeared as fast as it had come and Alice couldn’t help but smile for a moment as she slowly copied that same structure she had admired many weeks before, letting the magical energy reach into each one of the fibers and watching as the long threads of proteins started gently twisting around themselves, becoming shorter and thinner but also stronger and more durable at the same time.

As a result, within minutes since the start of the process, Alice found herself on the ground once again, whimpering in pain as her muscles started stretching and shrinking as a result of her actions, the sensation like that of countless cramps all happening at the same time, her muscles twisting beneath her skin as if they were trying to free themselves from a net.

The sun had long given way to the stars when Alice finally managed to get up on her unsteady feet, her body dripping cold sweat and shivering in the cold air of the night, each and every single one of her muscles burning and screaming under her skin.

She ignored the small pool of vomit that was splattered on the ground and instead hastily removed her dress for the first time in weeks, letting her bioluminescence illuminate her naked self and closely inspecting her work, a soft gasp escaping her lips when she finally observed the results of her suffering.

She goggled at the clear definition of her muscles against the glowing skin, staring at the perfectly drawn abs that had appeared on her belly, at the thin but incredibly taut biceps on her arms and at the wiry calves that rippled under her skin, promising feats of strength that she could barely imagine.

She couldn’t help but check her perfectly toned butt, its shape as if set in stone, exhaling a barely audible ‘what the hell’ when she slapped her thighs and they barely jiggled, a slightly hysterical laugh echoing in the silence of the night as she prodded the muscles beneath the skin, finding them tight and ready to pounce, the weakness she had felt a few hours before completely forgotten by her body.

Grasping the mace with one hand, she almost slammed it against the wall when she tried to swing it, its weight barely perceivable in her hands, her muscles moving with incredible speed under her skin, barely contracting as they exerted incredible forces.

With bated breath, she took a few unsure steps towards the closest window, almost faceplanting a few times when she found herself unable to finely control the new muscles, soon squeezing herself out of the opening and looking down into the street below, the ground at least four meters away.

She jumped, the sensation of falling in her guts soon replaced by the hard ground under her feet, a weak tremor reverberating through the stone as her legs bent and the impact moved through her body without injuring her.

“Oh damn,” she couldn’t help but mutter, slowly straightening her posture and taking a few steps towards the door.

She would definitely need time to adjust.

A street away, hidden under the leafy canopy of the wisteria, the small group of monkeys slowly moved away from their hiding spot, silently following after the purplish lips of their leader, a barely healed gash running across its face.

Away from the glowing creature that had hunted them.

For now.

*****

This chapter is officially sponsored by John D.! Thank you for your support!