The wolf took a deep inhale, its snout to the sky.

Or where the sky would be, were it outside.

Regardless, it didn’t know what exactly, but it could feel something changing about the [Devourer] Skill.

As its feast continued, a buzzing of adrenaline, of excitement, of hunger beyond the depth of its own flesh ravaged its sense of patience, and before long, it was taking a couple minute long rests in between feedings as soon as its jaw stopped feeling like it was about to fall off, just to devour the countless rats. It could sleep, but with every minute wasted, the flesh grew less nurturing and more and more unusable for anything but sub-par nutrition.

A factor about flesh that it had not considered before, was simply its state of decomposition. Decomposing flesh was much less effective for nutrients, and it honestly wasn’t entirely sure of how [Devourer] would be able to put rotting flesh to use.

It could take the normal flesh in storage and use it for keeping itself fed for prolonged periods of time, using the water content of the blood to keep it hydrated with the rest of the bits being used as nutrition, among various other possibilities, but the instinctual knowledge that came with the Skill was that rotting flesh, depending on how rotten, gave much less to work with. Less of what, or how, it wasn’t sure.

So even though it had devoured almost a third of the damn rodents, and two of the humans, there was just too much stuff to eat, and not enough time, especially with the humid heat inviting an utterly infuriating amount of insects to help the process of decomposition along. For the first dozen or so hours, it was fine, but then it was as if they materialized out of thin air to settle on everything in sight.

The buzzing wasn’t even the worst part, the worst part was that it was so absolutely drenched in blood that it had a near constant cloud of the damn things nibbling at its fur and trying to get into its ears. Anger was a rather rare thing for the wolf.

Until now.

It hated insects, it decided.

They were even more frustrating than the realization that the other female of the humans had unfortunately landed in the trash pits, and this meant it only had two humans to devour, as going into the trash pits was a rather swift guarantee it would get stuck and crushed by the gears at the bottom when they started spinning. Well, not a complete guarantee, as it knew there was a gap between the gears that the rats used to clamber up, but close enough to not even consider risking it.

It didn’t regret helping the human female, as she hadn’t been any trouble to it as the hours passed, but that greed in its mind insisted it just go back and kill her. She was defenseless, blind. It would just take one careful snip at the back of her neck to sever her spine.

But it refrained, [Mental Resistance] pulling its weight once more to push the greed and bloodlust back.

If only that would work on its damn temper, because those stupid flying little things were buzzing, and humming, and constantly ruffling the fur on its inside of its ears as if they were trying to look for a place to burrow, and it was driving it insane.

Eventually, it stopped in the middle of chowing down a half-rotted rat, and snarled in frustration as it shook itself free of the flies.

For about all of one second, before the damn things returned.

If only it could… breathe fire, or electricity, or spew those toxic discolored bits of air, or anything to kill these pests-

A sound like countless tiny bits of shuffling paper to the side made its head snap up with a dry crackle as the solidified bits of blood on its neck and chest broke apart into chunks, and it got to see the human with her hand up, a bright burst of orange sparks spewing out of her hand in a cone at the large horde of insects trying to settle on her, before tugging her coverings over her head with the same hand as soon she was finished.

A good idea, actually. It should do the same.

The important part was that the insects died by the hundreds, and for about five whole seconds, the human was free of the annoying flies.

Perhaps she wasn’t as little of a threat as it thought she was. She was still blind though, and her hearing and sense of smell was likely as useless as any other human’s, so she was still relatively harmless, as long as the wolf didn’t let its nails scrape the ground and reveal its location if it moved close to her.

It could only look on jealously as the girl blasted the insects again, so after a few moments of doing exactly that, it turned back to the rodent at its feet, the motion being accompanied by a bout of sudden dizziness.

It stumbled in place for a moment, and after the floor stopped moving under its feet, it realized that it hadn’t slept in… more than a full light cycle. More than a day. Not a great choice on its part.

With a grumble of annoyance and slowly encroaching exhaustion, it trotted over to the scraped off remnants of fabric from the human male it had just finished eating an hour ago, and hooked a canine into the biggest piece of fabric it could find, the back portion of the man’s covering, and prepared itself for a bout of dizziness.

It was just heavy and stiff enough from being soaked in blood that it could easily drape it over its head and ears like one of those weird head coverings humans used, so its tilted its head and moved it side to side to start building momentum as the fabric swung back and forth, and then moved its head in a semicircle to make the fabric drape over its head. It was a bit awkward, and it had to unhook its canine from the fabric using its tongue, but it worked.

It really needed to figure out how to make its paws able to switch to ‘human’ mode, its own ‘fingers’ were basically immovable, never mind being useful when trying to handle anything with any sort of dexterity.

For a few, long moments, it stood rigid as the world spun, until the feeling of disorientation faded.

Its hearing wasn’t terribly dampened by the fabric, and it kept the flies away from its ears, so it used what little it could see under the covering to find a decent, dry corner to tuck itself into for a decent sleep, laying its head chin-down on the floor with its paws keeping the fabric tight over its ears to keep the flies from waking it up.

Its body had been so overworked that it was having trouble snapping itself out of perseverance mode, but after five or ten minutes, it finally fell back to the familiar lucid dream as the symbols welcomed it back.

-[Infection Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 7 → Level 8

-[Iron Stomach] has Leveled Up. Level 4 → Level 6

-[Mana Perception] has Leveled Up. Level 2 → Level 3

-[Mana Manipulation] has Leveled Up. Level 2 → Level 3

-Acquired Titles:

Glutton Beyond Compare: You have eaten multiple times your body weight over a single uninterrupted period of consumption. You gain +1 to Strength and Speed while your stomach is adequately filled. Bonus is doubled when your stomach is filled to the brim.

That… was unfortunate. It’s stomach was literally never filled. It all went into the [Devourer] Skill’s storage. Maybe it could… find something solid its Skill couldn’t eat and just have it inside its stomach permanently? That sounded possible, but at the same time, it sounded not only dangerous, but also very difficult to undo.

So that wasn’t happening, at least for now.

A bit disappointed in its new title, it watched the symbols leave, and the [Devourer] Skill activated.

The rats it had devoured still had plenty to show it, surprisingly, and the information wasn’t exclusive to them only. It shared a downright ridiculous amount of similarities to humans, which was absolutely insane to the wolf, as the two creatures couldn’t be further apart from the other. But if the symbols said it was true, then it was true. It was still bizarre, however.

The process of information rushing to its mind was so much more smoother than before, so much easier, that understanding of said knowledge came like a brick sliding into its place in a wall. Seamless. Down to the cellular level and even deeper into the insides of the cells, it learned all there was to know, the difficulty no larger than remembering an odd mental image it had forgotten.

The humans were next, and it noted that part of the reason they were so smart was due to the folds in their brains, not the size of their brains. But it still had no idea how to recreate that intelligence without the possibility of breaking itself, so it left it as something to be thought about later.

It looked at the odd way the humans used their tongues and vocal cords, and had an idea.

The human girl knew how to use ‘mana’ to summon that cone of sparks, or that orb of light. Which meant that not only did she know how to use and manipulate the ‘mana’, she also knew how to actually turn it into different things.

And if it could learn how to communicate with her, through their weird way of yipping and barking and grumbling, it could get the girl to show it how to do it as well. Humans had a far larger variety of ways and sounds to communicate, most of which were probably very specific, so it wasn't too far fetched of an idea. Its vocal cords were already very similar in structure to the human’s, if a lot lower in their pitch and baritone, so it wouldn’t even need to do any changes there.

It had never tried to speak like a human, but if it could get the girl to start blabbering again, it could sit nearby and try to mimic her.

Frankly, it had no idea whatsoever of how to learn another species’ method of communication. It believed it was smart enough to do so, especially if it kept putting points in Intelligence, which it absolutely planned to, so the only barrier was… what? Time?

The other humans didn’t seem to be in a rush to grab her. It might have time. Alternatively, it could just drag her into one of the less toxic areas of the last floor with the burning rivers, and keep her there. It would be like keeping and feeding a pup, except it would be larger, needier, and a human.

… Which was unlikely to work, and the human could easily die from the poisons, not to mention the logical mess that getting her down there was.

So it had to hurry and try to learn how to speak human while it still had access to a stuck, defenseless human that couldn’t see it. It knew that humans used a combination of their tongue placement, teeth and vocal cords, using the air to make said cords vibrate to create their speech.

The problem was that its tongue severely lacked the dexterity that human tongues did, as well as its mouth structure being much different.

One of those issues was something it could fix.

Its tongue was an essential heat regulator, so it couldn’t just pick a human tongue to replace its own, meaning that it would have to do some manual work.