When the wolf finally felt its mind slip away from the clutches of oblivion back into the usual fugue of pseudo-consciousness it had obtained by having its [Restful Awareness] jump to Level fifteen, the bone-deep, pulsing pain radiating off the back of its neck was the first sensation to greet it.

The first thought, was the question of what the difference between being knocked out and being asleep was, for the Skill to only activate now instead of earlier.

It brushed aside the System’s updates, quickly attempting to fix itself with manual haste. It snapped its spine back into place with a meaty pop, regenerated the cut and damaged nerves in moments, intervertebral discs being slid back into place and all damage being forcibly reverted in a matter of a couple minutes of focus.

Torn muscles in its neck, burst eardrums, and six shallow but gaping holes followed, thankfully not bleeding still, as the wolf quickly ran a mental check on its body for anything else that required immediate attention. It saw that it had a torn open nostril, lingering blood loss, minor bits of frayed bone tissue that had lost a bit of structural strength, but those were all things that it saw no reason to waste its mental capacity towards for the immediate moment.

Frankly, it was immensely lucky that it had only paralyzed itself instead of outright killing itself. That was not its best moment.

As it waited, it idly wiggled its antennae and forced its fur to ruffle by itself to get at least a muted sense of its surroundings and shake off the half-dried bits of slime covering it from snout to tail, the events that led to its precarious situation slowly filtering back to its mind.

It mentally blanked however when its fur and cerci hairs tried to undulate under the human’s limb on its back, its antennae very vaguely giving it the impression that the human was laying… basically on top of it.

While the insect’s drying corpse was just a few handwidths from its snout.

As it slowly recanted the events before it had panicked and almost accidentally killed itself, it quickly pieced together what had likely happened, despite how difficult it was to believe.

The human had somehow dropped down a distance several times her height, and saved it, judging by the mild scent of charred decay in the air. A turn of events it was not at all expecting, but was very thankful for.

While [Pack Hunter] was a Skill that allowed it and the human to share a deep and accurate feeling of where each other was and what direction they were focusing on during moments of perceived danger, it hadn’t exactly been of sound mind while fighting for its life to consider that she might manage to fight through her injuries to come to its aid.

That thought brought the wolf full circle back to the simpler facts of the events that led them to this position.

It had almost died, and would be insect food by now if it wasn’t for the human.

And the only thing it could really blame was its reluctance to use its own abilities to their fullest extent. The reluctance to having its form changed too far from what it had known, to veer outside of its comfort zone of ‘blending in’ as just another dog.

As if ‘blending in’ even mattered. It didn’t need to blend in, the attempt was simply a thin comfort blanket so it wouldn’t feel as alone, pretending to be part of a larger collective of similar beings so that it wouldn’t have to learn what being different from everything else meant, how such a thing would be perceived by the humans.

For all it knew, it could grow a second head, and the humans wouldn’t even care, but a paranoid caution had kept it clinging to covertness. It was a simple subconscious thought that had kept it… not stagnant, but not growing as much as it could be.

It felt…

Stupid.

It hadn’t been improving itself as much as it could because of feelings, because the notion of changing its body too much was somehow uncomfortable, as if comfort mattered more than being alive. Just thinking it aloud made it feel even dumber.

It waited for a few minutes in silence, both mental and physical, waiting for everything important to finish, before changing from manual change to conceptual.

A quick fix of its more minor injuries was applied, to start as soon as it was done changing itself, a process which could take a lot longer than usual this time around. Because for once, it truly wasn’t going to hold back whatsoever.

The process of remembering and inspecting the human arm structure didn’t take much time at all, it was extremely simple in comparison to other things in its body that it had messed with before. What took time was trying to understand how the wolf would have to change that structure to fit into its biology.

For starters, the wolf was missing a lot of the human musculature that was used to move their arms that way. From their pectorals, to the way their trapezius helped elevate or lower their shoulders, to the various muscle connections and the ways those muscle groups weaved around each other to function, many of which the wolf did not even have.

The wolf had to make some sacrifices to do all this. Its chest and ribcage were far too narrow to support that musculature properly, so the first order of business was expanding its ribs to the sides and adding more stretchy bone mass to offset the larger area coverage. Then it had to fiddle around with its tendons and muscles just a bit to make sure nothing would catch or strain from the changed base that its bones provided.

It felt like the process took a really long time, but in this half-dreaming state, it didn’t know if that was true in the outside world. What it did know was that this was all going to cost a lot of essence, essence it hadn’t been replenishing for what felt like one to two weeks.

Its meat storage had depleted by almost one fifth already. It was mildly worrying, but the wolf reminded itself that it had to be alive to hunt in the first place, and returned to its task.

After another while of fiddling with the placement of various things, adding and removing bits and pieces and a hundred other tiny details, it had finished changing its rib cage, as well as restructuring the musculature of its back. It also added a small set of collarbones, a bone that its own biology didn’t have, whose main function was to greatly assist in keeping its shoulders on the sides of its body instead of on the front.

Next were the bones and joints of its forelegs.

Joints were mostly what gave the humans the incredible movement range they had. Some closed and opened like hinges such as their knees and elbows, others were simply more versatile and sacrificed a bit of power for incredible range of movement, a change the wolf was more than happy to apply.

But before it did that, it had to stop and consider how these changes would affect said movement. Now, its forelegs were made for forward movement, the elbows naturally tilting outwards and sliding back along the sides of its ribcage with each bound, making it so that the wolf benefitted from having its forelegs’ paws close to each other as it ran. With its widened ribcage, that sort of running would be impossible with its current legs, as its elbows would just slam into its own ribs all the time.

But even if it changed its forelegs to resemble human arms, its movement would still have to change a bit. Humans’ arm structure was vastly different, and vastly larger than its own, with almost double the muscle mass to assist them in their more varied movements.

Trying to imagine itself with a set of roughly humanoid forelegs was a bit difficult, but it could sort of visualize it, and thus where it would have to make some very obvious changes. For starters, their palms were far too long and flat, so the wolf shrunk them a little, shortened the metacarpal bones, and added a bunch of its own paw padding at the bottom, just to make them better for running than manipulating things.

Then it removed the thumb, seeing as it would only get in the way when doing anything that wasn’t fiddling with human devices, and looked at the fingers.

Again, too long. They’d just slap against the ground with every step and slow the wolf down.

So it went from the knuckle, to the first joint of each finger, and severed the two final ones for each, copying the tapering structure of the final joint to graft its nails at the end, before adding rough toe pads at the bottom again. Not thin enough to bruise its ‘fingers’ whenever it ran, but not thick enough to prevent the wolf from bending them inwards at a sharp angle.

After a bit of fiddling with its mental design, adjusting proportions, tendon thickness, and considering the pros and cons of everything it was doing, trying to mentally simulate movements it would be doing and checking for issues, it ended up with a…

Surprisingly solid version of a vaguely humanoid set of forelegs. Besides the additional muscles on it, and the different proportions, it didn’t even look that much different from its old legs.

It could bend its ‘fingers’ enough to rake its nails, or, claws, rather, through whatever it wished, at whatever angle it wished, it could move to the sides and even reach its own backside with a bit of stretching. Its gait would have to change a little bit, with how its forelegs’ ‘upper arm’ was twice as long now, and its forearm was shorter. Its elbows would probably have to flare out to its sides a lot to not make its trot awkward, but that was perfectly fine.

Another minor change was that human arms were a bit too muscular, so the wolf focused on making the muscles wiry but incredibly tough and strong to offset that problem. Too much top-weight didn’t feel right, and adding all that muscle, bone and fur on its upper body to accommodate its changes was already making it feel like a problem.

It would take some getting used to, and the process of such drastic change would likely be very awkward in transition, but the wolf applied the change and turned to other matters.

The empty space it had created in its chest cavity by enlarging its ribcage.

Frankly, it didn’t need to put much thought into it. It just enlarged its lungs to fill the space up. A good little bonus to its stamina.

Next, its antennae. Immeasurably useful thus far. And very awkwardly placed. Having to move its entire head and neck just to get a better feel of its surroundings was not the greatest idea it had thus far, even if it had served the wolf well.

It stuck a small ring of antennae around each of its front and back paws’ “wrists”, about six inches long. Enough to easily brush the floor when it wished them to, so it quickly ran the nerves through its limbs up to its brain. And to prevent information overload…

As difficult as it could be, it decided to work with what it already had, and build off from that. It knew that chronic pain changed the way the spinal cord, nerves, and brain would process unpleasant stimuli. It was how pain tolerance worked. So for the first time, it tried to mess around with its own brain, just a little bit, to see if it could set up some sort of mental block for the antennae, to prevent being overwhelmed.

In short, it took the nerve endings connected to its antennae and looked into how its brain processed that information.

And it understood absolutely nothing. Everything was a mess of tiny electric signals, proteins, fats, odd tissues and it was altogether just…

Too complicated. It was feeling overwhelmed and confused from just glancing at it all.

It could vaguely understand the basics of its own mind, but messing with it was way out of its abilities at the moment. And maybe ever. A tad disappointing, but it didn’t dwell on it.

Deciding to go for something simpler, it removed all the antennae from its snout to offset the chance of its mind buckling under the strain of sensations, and put its whiskers back into place, allowing its mind to quickly cannibalize the antennae and their nerves.

A quick mental evaluation revealed to the wolf that its antennae-related changes would only take a dozen or so hours, which was a very sharp difference from before, where they took the wolf around… a couple days or so?

Something to keep track of.

Another issue it had idly thought of fixing during long hours of dragging, was that the wolf tended to have issues falling asleep when it had nothing else to do and it wished to speed the changes along. After a certain point its body just refused, too full of energy to even consider sleeping, something that had become a far larger issue when it had reached seven on Endurance.

The thing that mainly induced sleep was the ‘pineal’ gland, a little gland at the center of its brain that produced a chemical called ‘melatonin’ that would make the mind sleepy and drowsy, usually a call to sleep, rather than the thing that prompted or sustained sleep. Still, it was as good of an assist as any, so the wolf made a tiny gland to make melatonin in its abdomen. It led the created melatonin into a small sack surrounded by a thin film of muscle the wolf could contract to squeeze the fluid out into its bloodstream. Less efficient than directly excreting it into the brain, but the wolf wasn’t going to be messing around with its skull anytime soon.

Establishing a mental connection to the muscles that were around its chemical sacks was something it would probably have to do manually. Its body didn’t quite recognize that those muscles were there. So it would just… go and tug them about, try and make its own body properly feel and realize that those little muscles were there and could be pulled.

Unwilling to leave that for later, it swapped to manual and did exactly that, trying to get its body to feel the new muscles in its stomach and how to pull them to squeeze current and future sacks easily. After a couple minutes, it felt like it could do it while awake, so it changed back to conceptual change.

With its chest, back, shoulders, forelegs, antennae, and another sac of chemicals on the way, it focused on the finer details.

Its fur was too thin, too weak. The wolf thickened and toughened its hide until it was as coarse as sand, as tough to cut as layered leather. It would definitely be a little too warm, but it didn’t feel like there would be an issue of overheating.

Next, its new ‘fingers’ had too much fur around the nails, so it got rid of the fur at the tips and removed the hair follicles to make sure nothing would grow on its fingertips to really bring out the length of its nails. It turned to its gums, and peeled them back, as low as they could go, and encased its teeth in tight vices of hardened bone instead of its weak gums.

That relatively simple change almost doubled their length. Its canines were a little longer than half the length of the human’s fingers. A sizable upgrade.

So much of the height of its teeth were buried in its gums, it was a little frustrating to think it only decided to do this now.

It was a little disappointing that two thirds of its teeth were too flat to really cut through something unless the wolf tilted its mouth to use their edges to cut, as they were mostly crushers and such. Thankfully it could still feel from the Skill that being able to change its nails and teeth was not too far off a possibility. It was already getting ideas for how to change them.

Beyond that however, as it looked at its body, and added a bit more vascularity to its muscles to keep them properly fueled, it had to pause to consider other options, its mind struggling to come up with new ideas.

But it didn’t really wish to stop now. It had gone into this with the thought of removing all inhibition, and besides its forelegs and upper body, it didn’t feel like it had changed enough. Maybe once it was a little stronger, its bones would be bending from the pull of its muscles, but that wasn’t really a problem yet, and neither were most of the tiny issues it could spot. Fixing them would only bring about more problems for the most part.

Still, with a bit of creativity, it had located a few problems, and plausible solutions to them as well.

For starters, it was far too top-heavy. Its muscle mass on the upper half of its body had almost doubled from its changes, despite its attempts to downsize the muscles by making them tougher and smaller. Its balance would just be completely off.

One way to change that was the simple solution of weighing its bottom half down as well.

Without elaboration, it sounded like it was just creating another problem. Why weight itself down just to get a little bit more balance? But the more the wolf considered it, the more it felt like it would only be a boon.

When it charged the insect, its strength wasn’t the issue. Its legs didn’t offer much help, the thing that slammed into its enemy was just the wolf’s body, and the impact was mostly dictated by a mixture of the wolf’s weight and its speed. And its weight right now was really light. Even if the wolf had gone incredibly fast into the charge, there was just not enough weight to throw the insect back with enough force to prevent retaliation. That was what made its charge so ineffective.

It had really good strength for its size, but it didn’t have the weight to properly ground itself and use that strength in fights.

Maybe it would become a little slower with all the added weight, which was a mild concern, but as its muscles grew tougher and stronger with every day that passed, and its body adjusted, it didn’t feel like it would ever come across the problem where it was too heavy to move itself at the speeds it wanted to, unless it tried to make itself an absolute giant of a canine. Giant as in, twice as tall as a human at shoulder height. Just… massive.

Then it could imagine that such immense weight would become very hard to push around.

But until and if it got to that point, weight would only give it an advantage in fights.

And a disadvantage when trying to move across the human nest, considering how unstable and rickety much of the terrain was…

The wolf was starting to feel like everything was a trade-off, and it didn’t much like that possible realization.

But when thinking about what really mattered, it felt like the weight would be worth it in the short-term. Maybe when it got outside and had to traverse the long swathe of pits and drops that was the human nest, it would change itself back to something lighter.

The added weight itself was not mere fat. After much time and visualization, it added a few more minor, but strong muscles to assist with maneuvering its hind legs, abdominal muscles somewhat similar to humanoids to help its abdomen curl, and added a whole host of musculature and tendons to its back and tail. After deciding to double its length.

The tail was there for balance and communication anyway, so adding weight onto its tail just made sense. Being able to actually grab things with it was another bonus. And being able to actually grab it with its mouth was another. No more spinning in circles!

Beyond that however, it was part of the solution to another problem.

That problem being the human. Carrying her around was getting really frustrating, and now that they were in some sort of structure, the wolf assumed the trip would only get more annoying for both of them. Stairs, debris, random things that would catch on her coverings that simply weren’t there in the mossy, rusty pipe, the slowly dwindling supply of meat in the wolf’s storage. Maybe they’d even have to jump some gaps if they were unfortunate enough.

So the wolf was just going to carry her on its back for the sake of comfort, convenience, and speed.

It would use its new and far more dexterous tail to hold onto her legs to make sure they didn’t hit everything all the time, and then design a rather cumbersome carrier made of bone on its back for her.

While the idea was rather silly, it was too annoyed by constantly pulling her along to consider any other alternative.

So its lower body was weighed down by a somewhat prehensile tail and more muscles after an indeterminate amount of time, and with its mind exhausted, the wolf set to the last thing it wished to create. The carrier itself.

And then it remembered the strange, sticky, veiny slime of the insect, and almost woke up from its slumber just to smack its own head into the dusty floor for being so damned hasty.

It didn’t need a carrier, it just had to copy whatever that insect did on its back and use it to carry the human. Obviously.

How convenient.

Discarding any thoughts of bone-made carriers for its human packmate, it created another skin sac full of modified blood for the human on its leg, and finally turned to the system to see its progress.

You have progressed on your Path.

[Hound of The Keeper] Level 16 → Level 17

Attribute Points Available: 1

-Attributes:

Strength ( +0 )

Speed ( +1 )

Dexterity ( +0 )

Endurance ( +7 )

Perception ( +1 )

Resolve ( +1 )

Intelligence ( +5 )

Soul ( +1 )

Without much thought, the wolf put the point into Strength, one of the only two Attributes that still had a big zero next to it. Perhaps in the hope it would offset the additional muscle mass and help it not feel bogged down by it.

Strength ( +1 )

-[Poison Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 12 → Level 13

-[Echoes of Oblivion] has Leveled Up. Level 3 → Level 4

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

-[Mana Manipulation] has Leveled Up. Level 6 → Level 7

-[Sonic Blast] has Leveled Up. Level 1 → Level 3

-[Tremor Sense] has Leveled Up. Level 2 → Level 3

-Acquired Traits:

Enduring has progressed to Struggler.

Struggler (2 / 5): You have felt the chill of death many times, and survived. You are tougher.

The wolf proverbially stared at the Trait for a few moments in a mixture of satisfaction and realization. It finally knew what those numbers next to the traits actually meant. Some kind of Level progression, albeit obviously different. It still wished the Trait would explain how much tougher its body was.

With nothing else to do for now, it sat and rested for a couple hours, finding that even though [Devourer] and the symbols had both retreated, it could still think during its sleep. It was muddled, slow, and hazy, as if the wolf was dizzy and had trouble using its brain, but basic thoughts were still rather easy to form.

Most of those thoughts tended to wander to how nice it felt to have something warm and alive next to itself without that being a cause of immense concern. A few of them lingered on how unfortunate it was that its eyes were done changing, and it couldn’t even see all the infinite shades of new colors because of the pitch black void around them.

Eventually, however, it thought of how flesh tended to degrade over time, and shook itself awake, carefully wiggling away from the human’s grip to stand on its own feet.

They felt awkward. Moving felt awkward. Like everything was just a bit off center, a bit too long or large. Comparing its size to the human made it abundantly clear that the wolf was growing bigger at an almost alarming rate, and it could assume that sleeping for an unknown amount of time made that growth all the more apparent to before it had knocked itself out. It was the size of a normal dog by now, if a bit more muscled. There wasn’t even a hint of malnutrition on its body, judging by the image it got from the vibrations.

It could only assume that this feeling of awkwardness would increase tenfold when the changes to its forelegs and body finished in a few dozen hours.

Oh, it could actually feel flesh growing under its skin if it focused.

Leaving that observation aside with a shiver of discomfort, it tapped a foot while rubbing its half-digested snout antennae on the floor to get a better picture of what it was looking for, then trotted to the decaying insect’s scattered limbs.

Eating them was…

Absolutely disgusting. It had eaten half-digested, half-melted and half-rotten scraps of meat that were more appetizing than the absurdly bitter and salty slime that made up the insect’s insides. Its hard exoskeleton was an absolute pain to swallow, forcing the wolf to very slowly chip away hard pieces so nothing would gouge out its throat when swallowed. So the wolf got to ‘enjoy’ the disgusting, tongue-burning flavor for as long as possible.

At least the texture of the slimy, stretchy, oversized veins that covered the insides of the bottom section of each foot was surprisingly enjoyable.

Six limbs later, it was debating whether it should go to sleep just to deactivate all of its taste buds before continuing with the body.

But it really wanted to know what it could get from the damned thing, and it was in no mood to hunt down another one to understand how to get that sticky slime for itself. The venom, whatever it was, would be a nice addition as well.

With a low, slow grumble of misery, it got to work on the tear-shaped body, biting into its flank and ripping open a hole to its squishy insides.

...

Eating the whole thing took hours.

Not just because of its surprisingly hard-to-swallow exoskeleton, nor because of the horrible flavor, but because the wolf simply hadn’t considered that biting off things at random might not be the best idea. So it had been forced to go into self-repair mode when it had bitten into and swallowed a venom sack through its scratched up throat to paralyze it up to its eyes, having to manually move its diaphragm up and down while it figured out how to make its body flush the venom out.

That venom was some extremely potent stuff considering it easily worked through its ‘Struggler’ trait and Endurance.

Thankfully it could actually scoop out tiny bits of the venom from its bloodstream and hold them in place to observe what they were made up of.

It was an extremely complicated mixture of specific enzymes, proteins, carbohydrates, a cocktail of molecules specifically designed to mess with nerve signals, and a half-dozen other things that made up the venom.

Then it had to figure out how to make its body wipe it out by having its liver metabolize and burn said mixture, make its brain’s receptors respond less to it, and carefully nudge its immune system into attacking that very specific mixture of things the moment it detected them. Viciously.

While manually pumping its diaphragm to keep moving oxygen into its brain.

It came out of the experience with a relative immunity to being paralyzed by that specific venom, and a pounding, agonizing headache that felt like something was repeatedly slamming a human-sized boulder into its brain.

When the [Devourer] Skill activated, it didn’t even bother to look at what it had learned, brushing it aside and settling in for a very, very lengthy sleep, during which it turned off [Restful Awareness] for the first time.

When it woke up an indeterminate amount of time later, it was to a relatively mild migraine, at least compared to what it had before, and a human hand carefully playing with its ears.

It grumbled, stretching its legs out with a gaping yawn.

“Hey buddy.” The human whispered, a volume that the wolf greatly appreciated. It chuffed in acknowledgement, before dragging itself upright to finish eating the insect. Just a bit of its main body left, and a couple organs, and then it could change itself again and get moving.

Well, that was rude. She was hoping for the beast to start 'talking' to her. The exhausted fuzz in her mind demanded socialization however, so she continued speaking to the beast.

“I know you likely don’t understand me, and you’ve been out for a long time, but I’m kind of really hungry.” She murmured, hearing the crunching and wet snap of its jaws continue.

“Yeah, you greedy goblin, keep eating.” She complained quietly, half-jokingly. “I really have to teach you Carmeran. And my name. And [Haste] so you stop giving me bruises every time you want a boost.” She mused, her fingers idly brushing at the warmth left behind on the stone, where the beast had been asleep.

She missed that warmth.

Dragging herself all the way back to it was such a pain. Even finding the beast again was a pain in the ass, having to find it based on nothing but the faint sound of its breathing. And then it got up and walked away an hour later. So rude.

“And some manners, probably.” She breathed out, oddly relaxed, despite feeling like she was half-freezing to death. It was relatively warm down here, but with all this moisture in the air, it didn’t feel like it. Then again, it could be a side effect of a million tiny different things that could be wrong with her.

“You know, you’re really interesting. I could feel your body sort of… twisting and bulging under the fur, just a bit. Pretty weird. It’s a real problem for me, personally. ‘Cuz I don’t know how to refer to you. You’re dog-shaped, but you’re growing way too fast, you’re probably smarter than the average citizen, and your body just… writhes and undulates, slowly, in its sleep. So you’re some kind of beast or monster, but you’re the nicest damn monster I’ve ever heard of. Even if you have your moments of being an asshole or eating my teammates.” She slowly continued, unsure and at this point, uncaring of if the beast was hearing her.

It gave her one of its chuffs in reply, before digging into the spider again.

“You’re gross. Eating spiders. And my arm.” She let out a short, raspy giggle, before lifting her hand to massage her forehead as the humor faded.

“Why am I laughing at that?” She questioned, before mentally shrugging.

Why not laugh at that? She didn’t exactly have much in the way of stress-relief down here, and the high of victory over the eight legged horror had faded.

In fact, she’d almost had a rage-induced aneurysm when she’d opened her System screen.

She quickly brought it up again.

-Species: Humanoid

-Race: Elf

-Name: Emhreeil

-Paths: [Infuser] Level 13

Base Attributes:

Strength ( +0 )

Speed ( +0 )

Dexterity ( +0 )

Endurance ( +3 )

Perception ( +2 )

Resolve ( +1 )

Intelligence ( +4 )

Soul ( +2 )

Available: 1

-Racial Skills: [Attuned], [Quick Learner]

-Acquired Skills:

[Magic Resistance - Level 5]

[Mental Resistance - Level 6]

[Poison Resistance - Level 9]

[Pain Resistance - Level 19]

[Illumina - Level 8]

[Sparkburst - Level 17]

[Haste - Level 15]

[Mana Perception - Level 20]

[Mana Manipulation - Level 19]

[Mana Tank - Level 5]

[Mana Conduit - Level 7]

[Tough Skin - Level 1]

[Infection Resistance - Level 1]

[Disease Resistance - Level 1]

[Telemantic Construct - Level 7]

[Mana Touch - Level 1]

-Acquired Traits:

Kindhearted (1 / 3): You have shown yourself capable of both sympathy and empathy, and have backed up your emotions with actions that you believe were moral. Gain +1 in Soul and Resolve when helping sentient beings as long as you do not assist them with committing actions you find immoral.

Vampiric (2 / 2): You have sustained yourself on nothing but blood for many days and have taken many steps towards the path of vampirism. Blood is extremely palatable, sustains you as well as any food, severely hastens your natural healing and stamina recovery, and drinking the blood of others gives you a temporary boost to all attributes. Healing, stamina recovery, and the duration and strength of the attribute boost depends on the amount of blood you have consumed and its quality.

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

She let out a low hiss of frustration escape her lips as she read ‘Vampiric’, over and over again. Because of course she got that now. Of course she couldn’t have gotten that any sooner, so she’d already be able to walk by now. No, that would be too kind of the universe.

She wasn’t even a vampire yet. She didn't know what the process to becoming one was, but if it was going to give her the 'vampiric' trait, at least MAKE HER ONE!?

Stupid system.

At least she got [Mana Touch]. She wasn’t completely blind anymore, at least for a couple feet, and for the relatively low cost of tossing mana out into the open air. Although some part of her felt like she should be jumping for joy right now, she just... It was infuriating.

The trait just felt like a band-aid at best.

“I feel like this thing is made to mock me, you know?” She murmured. “Never does what I want it to, never gives me what I want it to, never gives me something useful when I want it to. Is that just me, buddy? ‘Buddy’ sounds weird.” She murmured, her head limply lolling side to side as she continued her ramblings. “I should give you a name, until you can give yourself one. If you want a name, I don’t know how smart beasts do things. But naming you makes me feel like I’m declaring you as my pet. Which would be dumb, you know?”

The beast took a short moment to chuff back at her, and she felt a smile tug at her lips. She could almost delude herself into thinking they were having a genuine conversation.

“I know, right? You could probably kill me twenty different ways. Naming you like you’re my abomination monster dog… sounds like some of that patented Elven arrogance.” She shifted a bit to straighten her back, wishing she still had that face covering.

“I actually saved you. That was pretty… ‘cool’.” She murmured, her fingers coming up to slowly trace the gaping holes of her eye sockets.

Surprisingly, they didn’t feel as tender as before.

“What’s the score, buddy? Ten for you, one for me…? Just gotta…” She paused to muffle a yawn, her fingers moving down to trace along her pulse and jugular. “Save you nine more times, and we’ll be even.” She finished.

A short, mutual silence followed, the beast continuing to crunch away at the spider.

“If we ever make it out of here… I’m going to do so many things.” She softly breathed out, feeling tears come out of her abused tear ducts as she gave the empty void a watery smile full of hope. Not that she was sure of why she was crying, but her emotions were all over the place lately.

Her sockets didn’t hurt anymore from the salt, at least.

“Or at least try. I’ll find Katherine. I’ll find some way to see, then join an adventuring team. A real one. A good one. I’ll buy a telepathy spellbook to speak to you, teach you Carmeran. Could probably teach you how to read and write as well. You’re certainly smarter than I was as a kid. You could do it. You could show me your evil lair full of human bones and spooky bats, and I’ll show you that little cube apartment I bought for myself.” She imagined it, her smile widening.

“Actually, it’s probably sold or broken into now. I’m probably considered dead. Wonder what happened to my stuff. Woe is me, I lost my notebook and singular change of clothes.” She deadpanned, feeling her nostrils flare in amusement. Her mirth faded quickly, a strange clarity filling her mind.

The beast paused for a moment, giving her a tired and oddly… light grumble-bark-howl kind of sound. As if it kind of understood her mirth, even if not its source and reasoning. Or maybe she was ascribing humanoid patterns of behavior to something monstrous just so she’d feel like she could understand it a bit more. Regardless, it was nice.

The crunching and shearing sounds continued, and she just snorted at the absurdity of what she was doing.

The beast snorted back at her.

“Getting sassy aren’t we?” She clicked her tongue in mock disapproval, her smile widening into a grin as her chest shook with mirth for a short moment.

In reply, the beast trotted closer, a dusty paw coming to brush against her mouth and making her sputter and cough as she accidentally inhaled a healthy mouthful of dust. It grumbled at her, a light, chiding sort of sound, then pawed at her cheek, where the face covering she had would be.

She spent a few more moments violently coughing to the side, then groaned as she flattened her back to the floor once more.

“Food?” She tried, hoping to teach it how to speak instead of pawing at her mouth with its dirty paws every time it wanted to feed her.

Then she repeated it a couple times as the beast got increasingly annoyed with her, and finally, it mimicked her instead of pawing at her face.

“Fhwoood.” It growl-howled, and she let out a soft laugh, lifting her hand to pet along its head and ears, something that the beast surprisingly welcomed as it tilted its head around to show her where it wanted scratches.

She had trouble not thinking of it as a dog sometimes, especially when it did things like this.

“Good job buddy. Food.” She murmured, and let up on her petting, covering her eyes with her hand and opening her mouth.

Compared to before, the blood felt utterly divine.

After biting off the skin sac and settling down for a quick nap, with its snout nestled into the hollow of the human’s throat, it prepared itself for some quick changes.

The first odd thing about the insect was that it had a very odd name.

‘Roof-tumor’.

That… didn’t make any sense. At all. It wasn’t a tumor, and the insect didn’t seem particularly attached to height when it was trying to get to the human.

Maybe that’s just what the humans called it? So… did the symbols use the human’s names for everything? Why and how…?

Regardless, the biology of the insect was both extremely simple and extremely complicated. It used some absurdly overcomplicated system of liquid pressures to move its limbs, which even a single puncture could easily jeopardize.

It was, frankly, stupid.

It was just a bad system, so it completely ignored it. Its ‘chitin’ carapace was an interesting idea, being fairly stretchy while being about as hard as regular bone, but the wolf couldn’t find anywhere to put that to use, so it also ignored it for the moment.

At the end, it only cared about the sticky slime veins and the venom.

It quickly put its paralyzing venom sacks into its own abdomen, and connected them to two chitinous, black fangs that it created on the underside of its jaw, right at the end. They were fairly mobile, even if they lacked much of the supportive structure the insect had, so the wolf could easily just close its mouth and press its snout into something, then use the fangs to paralyze them. They weren’t even visible unless the wolf tilted its head up, so it didn’t have any compunctions about adding them immediately.

The dosage would have to be a bit delicate, because the venom was absurdly potent, but if it was planning on eating whatever it was trying to paralyze, it didn’t really matter.

The second point of interest was the veins. The ‘slime’ was simply a unique sort of mucus produced by the insect. It was naturally extremely sticky, and really easy for the body to produce, but the way it became so rigid, and seemed to almost actively fight against the wolf’s movements back then, was because the mucus responded to the pulses of electricity that came from the veins. Almost like a muscle contracting because of electricity.

That electricity was what made the mucus so tough and difficult to struggle against. The molecular bonds simply changed when electrically stimulated, and fought any changes to their structure based on the electrical signals given by the veins. If someone tried to stretch the slime in any direction, it would actively try to pull itself back to what the veins were telling it was its ‘neutral’ position, fighting against whatever they restrained without any active effort on the insect’s part. There were specific signals of varying intensity that could direct the mucus as well, like urging it to move in one direction or another.

It was utterly ingenious.

The 'veins' themselves were just as interesting, even if they weren't actually veins. It was just more convenient to think of them as such.

They were simply super compressed networks of stretchy material made up of intertwining layers of insulative fat, stretchy tendon tissue and nerves. Then they would get filled and covered with a unique mucus. Using that mucus inside the veins, the insect would use the nerves to send electrical signals to direct them the way it wanted, and fill the smaller, branching veins to expand outwards or contract them inwards.

The outside mucus would stick to something, then through the veins, more of it would be excreted and directed by them until it could basically cover whatever it wanted to.

Afterwards, through the same electrical signals, it could basically just soften the inside layers of the mucus that didn’t have filth stuck on them, and suck it back in, while the outer layer would harden and disconnect, being left behind on whatever surface or animal they’d stuck themselves onto, to prevent the insides of the insect from being clogged with trash.

Its application was also surprisingly easy. The wolf just had to make a sort of… flat, fleshy pocket across its backside, filled with the veins and the insect's mucus membranes along the walls, then make a thin slit across its back where the veins would come out of. Then connect the nerves to the odd, oversized tubes, and figure out how to control them.

It was delightfully simple to copy and apply. It made the [Devourer] Skill spend a bit more essence on nutrition for the mucus production and the extra material it would be fueling, both in terms of muscles and weird snot-veins, but it was more than worth it.

It then had the idea of climbing straight up walls like the insect had. If it could support both its own and the human’s weight… It could just climb up shafts and vents until it got to the surface.

So it added two smaller pockets, or sheaths, really, on the front of both its hind and forelegs, above the ‘wrist’ on its forelegs and just above its paws on its hind ones.

It was positively giddy about walking up walls.

How amazing would that be? Just being impervious to gravity? Maybe it could even stick itself to some of those metal boxes the humans used to move around, and see what it was like to hang over thousands of feet of cables and walkways without any worry of slipping off.

Its tail thumped almost painfully against the floor, and it heard the human make some short yipping sounds at the sound.

And now it had a small dilemma to deal with.

On one paw, it really wanted to get going.

On the other paw, it really wanted to sit and wait for all the changes to happen, and then acclimate itself to them before rushing out into the unknown. It didn’t particularly want to try fighting anything when it could still be trying to figure out how to walk properly.

It took a long time to come to a decision, but it eventually did. Rushing out without thinking would likely not end well.

It shook itself awake a bit, feeling the human’s left hand caressing and squeezing along its right paw and toe pads, her right shoulder being slightly occupied by the wolf’s chest and head.

Then it grumbled at her.

It wanted to practice human speech.

“You certainly had a nice dream, huh buddy?” She murmured, her voice light, and the wolf noted that she was asking something.

It wasn’t sure what, so it just started trying to mimic her words. Even with minimal assistance from [Logotexnia], it did pretty well, in its opinion.

“Uuu ssseertuhuunweee…” It started, the sound more of a mangled, low howl than anything, and focused a bit more on the Skill, using it to twist the sound waves into what it was trying to mimic.

“Aad ei naiiisss dhuream, haah buuhhhryy?” It finished proudly, and then poked her in the side lightly.

The human did her odd yipping sound again, a bit subdued.

“That still sounds so creepy… you abominable little goober.” She sighed, and before the wolf could try and mimic that, she grabbed its paw, and thumped it against her own sternum.

“Emhreeil. Emhreeil.” She repeated, and the wolf curiously tilted its head, its ear twitching against the human's cheek.

Was she trying to tell it that that was how ‘human’ was said, or trying to explain the sound that referred to her specifically? Regardless, it copied her.

“Eeemmmrrreeeee- eel.” It started, then grumbled. It didn’t sound right. So it tried again, and again, while the human pet its head approvingly, until it figured out that it was making the last sound too far apart from the rest.

“Eemreee-eel.” It finished, then let out a short, victorious howl. A very low volume one. It didn’t want to attract anything else to them right now.

“Good job buddy.” The human said, the sound a bit stuttered through her happy yipping, before, for some reason, repeating the sound and thumping its paw against her chest, then letting go of its paw.

Seeing the pattern, it did the same.

“Eeeemree-eel.” It said, then awkwardly pat her collarbone with its paw.

The wolf could basically smell the human’s happiness. And if it couldn’t, the almost violent petting and frantic repetition of “Good job!”, whatever that meant, was a good indicator of how joyous she was at teaching it her human-specific sound.

Or at least that’s what the wolf assumed it was. It knew humans had specific sounds for each other, as it had observed them using dozens of ‘greetings’ or ‘pay attention to me’ sounds that always made only one specific human turn around to communicate with them, and ‘Emree-eel’ sounded like one of those.

Then, with the same odd method of paw-touching and dragging, the wolf learned how to say ‘arm’, ‘hand’, ‘head’, ‘chest’, ‘stomach’, and ‘haste’, as well as what those sounds correlated to.

It was a very… relaxing way to spend a couple hours.

And although the young canine instinct to want to play with her was fairly strong, it wasn’t sure of how to do it. When it would observe the dogs of the human nest, it was always like a… mock fight, of sorts. It had never had a mock-fight with anyone before. And the human was weak and squishy and injured.

Well, if it could get her out of this place and return her to the human nest to heal, it could find her later and try. It had her scent memorized and baked into its brain by now.

Eventually, it settled down, half-on-top of her, and settled for a good, extremely long nap, squeezing the melatonin sac in its stomach dry and starting to feel extremely drowsy and sleepy within just moments.

If anything came towards them, the wolf could wake itself up in an instant with a shot of adrenaline anyways.

As the ‘beast’ quickly fell asleep, she had trouble staying still. The temptation to keep petting it was nigh irresistible.

Despite the terrible situation, she was almost… genuinely happy. It was so easy to get lost in the pleasant parts of the situation, and she did exactly that.

It was just… fun to teach it how to speak. And it learned so quickly. And when it wasn’t speaking like a creepy demon from the depths of the dark, it was just...!

Cute.

It was goddamn adorable, she loved this thing.

So what if it was a predator that had definitely debated tearing her throat out a couple times on the staircase? They were strangers then. Now…

The way it nestled its head under her jaw made her smile like an idiot.

Sure, the mental high she got from drinking its blood probably helped with the odd giddiness she felt, but even that thought just made her smile more. This ‘beast’ was giving her its own blood just to keep her alive.

She’d thought so for a while now, but it only really sank in at this moment. It was probably some kind of shapeshifter, considering it was never injured or anemic after feeding her, but still, the gesture just made her heart swell with warmth. It could bite through iron and crash through two stories before fighting some giant spider and be up and walking around just a day later, but it still decided she was worth going through all this trouble to keep her alive, despite the fact it didn’t need her.

She couldn’t really think of anyone in her life that would care enough to do something like that. She wouldn’t even care enough to do that for herself, with how much self-loathing she’d grown to nestle near her heart in recent times.

But this thing did.

Unable to help herself, she gently started running her fingers up and down its foreleg, slowly being lulled to sleep by its breaths.

Waiting for the changes while awake, would have taken a couple days.

Waiting for the changes while constantly forcing itself back to sleep, shortened that time period to just over… maybe forty hours?

Despite being woken up a few times by both the human for her meals, and the uncomfortable sensation of its own flesh moving and growing under its skin, it usually managed to fall asleep soon after. It mostly spent its sleeping hours tugging its new muscles around to form the mental connection, so it could easily feel and contract them when it woke up. Although that did have the side effect of making the human curiously grope at the muscles that seemed to move of their volition, as if it was a puzzle she couldn’t quite figure out.

And now, it simply lay on top of the human’s shoulder, experimentally flexing its forelegs’ right paw.

It was so strange, to be able to move its ‘fingers’. Being able to wiggle its fangs under its jaw, and excrete liquid venom from them was equally odd.

It wiggled off the sleeping human, and raised itself up. The first note of interest was the extremely odd sensation of its shoulder rotating so wildly, and its ‘wrist’ doing much the same. The additional muscles were a close second.

The extra weight was, thankfully, not terribly noticeable. It could only feel it if it was looking for that difference. The thing that was extremely noticeable was its tail.

It experimentally curled it into a loose spiral shape, then unwound it and pressed it hard against the ground. Then it curled its hindlegs and hopped off the ground to test the strength of the tail, its forelegs keeping its upper half supported. It was… adequate. It could hold up its bottom half with a bit of trembling and effort.

It flared the antennae on its legs as it hopped down, finding this method of feeling the vibrations a lot more convenient, and a lot more accurate and long-reaching as well. The impacts of its legs hitting the ground worked a lot better to make it feel what was happening by having the entire limb itself feel the shocks, and having almost double the antennae between its four limbs than before, it could feel things quite a lot further.

Just experimentally, it trotted around the empty space for a bit. Its first few steps were almost like learning how to walk again, its elbows tilting too early and at completely different spots than it was used to, making its body tilt almost at random as it fumbled for balance, and the distance between its legs being a lot wider than before didn’t exactly help.

After a couple minutes of hurriedly walking in circles however, it got the hang of it. The wider stance of its new legs could easily be adjusted by having its wrists closer together and its elbows flare out to the side more, just like it had visualized earlier. It wasn’t that much different from what it was used to, this way.

Within half an hour, it was effortlessly running around the room, its paws wreathed in silence to not wake up the human. It tested its newfound four dimensional capabilities by running forward then trying to lunge to the side, running forward then swiping at shoulder height, even by leaping at imaginary enemies to hook its nail- or ‘claws’, rather, into their backside.

It was so easy. It should have done this so much sooner.

Then came the hard part.

Trying to figure out how to control the veins and the slime was an absolute chore. It took hours of constantly forcing the veins through the ‘open’ slit at its back, and even then, trying to keep the slime, or specialized mucus, solid enough to stick to the veins, while moving each tiny individual vein to spread and flare them out, was extremely difficult. Holding a position was easy by comparison, but it still took almost a third of the wolf’s focus just to keep them stiff enough to say, hold the human in place.

It should have put that attribute point into Intelligence.

And the odd sensation of having a slowly expanding network of veiny, mucus-filled tentacles wiggling into the open air out of its back, was...

Really, really, really weird.

Regardless, what felt like uncountable hours later, it felt confident enough with the veins to do what it wanted to, and with its heart beating furiously in excitement, it walked to the wall under the rectangular holes full of glass, and put its forelegs against it.

Tiny pulses of electricity shot out of the numb nerves in the veins, and within seconds, a small network of wriggling, foul-smelling tubes covered in slime was creeping over its paws to stick to the wall. And then it curled its hind legs in and slammed them onto the wall, putting all of its weight onto its forelegs, carefully keeping the slime just liquid enough to be sticky and just solid enough to support its weight.

After a short moment of disbelief at the fact that it hadn't fallen down on its back yet, the realization slowly crept unto reality.

It was sitting on a wall.

Vertically.

It quickly wreathed its head in darkness, and let out a deafening victory howl only it could hear, its doubly-long tail slapping the rock floor below.

Wagging its tail with this length felt strange and off-key, but it ignored it for the favor of being giddy at the ability to just stick to walls if it wanted to.

It repeated its actions with its hind legs, the load on its front paws quickly halving, and then with a gait that felt equivalent to the pace of a snail, it started crawling up the wall.

At some point it reached the metal flooring above, and had to turn and crawl across the wall on its side, but it was still so much fun it couldn’t even bother feeling annoyed at the obstruction. The practice was great for its speed too. Every step went from taking a couple minutes, to usually hovering around sixty seconds, then thirty.

Just as an experiment, it tried to quickly detach, and completely stopped the signals from the nerves to the mucus. The slime took a second or two to actually loosen up, and then the wolf’s body simply fell down with a startled yelp, before hitting the floor with a harmless, but loud thump, the liquid slime coating its legs quickly having lost all cohesion along with the veins.

After a moment of observing the effect, it tried to quickly retract the veins into its legs with a few short signals, only using the mucus on the inside to deflate and sucker them back in. It was a... twitchy, mildly disturbing, but very quick affair, only taking a couple seconds to have them back in place in their little flesh pockets.

Though this method did waste the vast majority of the mucus it had produced by not taking the time to retract it with the veins. Mucus which was now coating all of its paws.

Not that it minded. It was absolutely ecstatic.

It simply rolled over and shot to its feet, and unable to contain its excitement, activated [Bloodrush] and started speeding in wide circles, tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth. Making sudden turns was so easy now!

It just had to throw a paw to the side, hook its nails into the stone at almost full cutting capacity and let the pull of its momentum swing its body the direction the wolf wanted it to, before resuming its run.

It didn’t stop there, trying various maneuvers and acrobatics, like leaping at the walls at an angle, then using its forelegs to spin its lower body above its head, and kick at the wall with hindlegs to shoot itself at an imaginary enemy. This freedom of movement felt amazing.

The human let out a loud, questioning sound, and the wolf just used its [Logotexnia] skill to send a very specifically directed grumble-howl of elation, making sure the sound wouldn’t bounce around too much and draw attention to them, before resuming its practice.

It jumped at iron pillars, using the dexterity of its forelegs to spin its body and absorb the impact, before using its hindlegs to jump at imaginary enemies at an angle, it tried using its tail like a whip, which surprisingly worked, judging by the strong impact it felt through its feet and the bruise on its tail tip, it tried using its tail to help it execute rolls that would help lessen the impact of a sheer drop, it used all of its instinctual and biological knowledge to strain its body and fully explore everything it could do.

By the end of it, even its seven points in Endurance couldn’t keep up, and the wolf was happily panting as it dragged itself back to the human, its muscular tail — that was as long as its own body now — limply dragging on the ground.

Despite its tired state, it wanted to do nothing more than start making its way back to the surface, but it refrained, taking a quick nap to rejuvenate itself before waking up, stretching, and turning to the girl.

It poked the human’s side lightly with its knuckles.

“Hhaaannnnd.” It growled, and the human’s reply came out in a sigh.

“Sure.”

A limp-wristed hand was presented to the wolf, accidentally bopping it on the nose before the human readjusted it.

"Sorry."

With its teeth blunted, it tried to figure out how it was going to do this.

Eventually, it simply stood parallel to the human on her left side and took her wrist in its mouth. Then, as slowly as it could manage, it lowered its body and tilted on its side, before swiftly rolling onto her torso, its back against her chest.

She made a strange ‘oof’ sound, idly adjusting her wrist between its teeth.

“Uh… what are you doing?” She whispered a question, and the wolf simply grumbled through her wrist in a chiding manner, a sort of ‘be patient’ sound.

It took a few seconds, but the pocket on its back swiftly inflated, before the first bits of the veins started creeping out.

This position was really awkward. It was only its flattened back and ribcage that kept it from tilting to the sides constantly.

Maybe it could do this by laying next to her next time?

Even weirder was the sensation of having to feel along the human to conform to her shape and wrap her up. The sensory abilities of the veins were like... a very, very numb tendril. Not that great.

Regardless, within a minute or so, the veins and the mucus- slime- whatever, had covered the front of the confused human’s chest, before finally inching towards her stomach and the torn parts of her coverings at the shoulders, prompting a weird exclamation of surprise from the human when they touched her skin.

Judging by the strength of her clothes, it could probably roll her over onto its back now.

It turned a paw to press against the ground on their left, and started to rock its body side to side, getting ready to turn itself over and finally start making progress.

With a final heave to the right, pushing away with its left forepaw on the ground for added momentum, it managed to swing itself over onto its side as the human yelped, going rigid against its back. Then it curled its right paw into its side, knuckles grinding against stone. With a growl of effort, it lifted them both upright, stumbling and staggering for a moment as its tail quickly curled around the human’s knees to stop her legs from flopping around everywhere.

Bones had to set to heal, and having them sliding and hitting everything in their path wouldn't help one bit.

With the human secured to its back, it adjusted her a bit so her head would be hanging off the right side of its neck, and her left hand over the left side of its neck, just for balance’s sake, before swiftly expanding the veins to grip onto her sides and hips for added stability.

Then it took a few experimental steps, the human’s breaths growing deeper as she was jostled around yet kept in place.

It was… pretty heavy, in all honesty. Mostly on its already trembling tail. The human’s navel was at its tailbone, as the wolf was still pretty… normal sized. So it was supporting almost half of her body weight with the tail. A tall order.

Compared to dragging her entire body weight by its teeth however, as well as fighting against the friction of her clothes against wet rust and moss, this was about half as hard.

Next time it napped, it would add a little sheathe of sticky veins on the upper side of its tail, or try and find ways to make it a bit stronger, but for the moment, it started trotting to the rusty door on the other side of the room, releasing the human’s wrist with a light, playful grumble.

Her hand immediately jerked up to feel along the mucus and veins. A sharp gasp escaped her.

Unlike the reaction it was expecting, which was something along the lines of confusion or appreciation, a sudden surge of fear entered its nostrils, with the human as its source, prompting it to stop walking and nudge the top of the human’s head with its snout where it hung by its neck, a vaguely questioning sound escaping its throat.

“A wolf.” The human breathed out, still rubbing one of the veins in her hands as if… impressed? Impressed and scared?

Humans still didn’t make sense.

“You’re a wolf.” She croaked out, her tone strangely heavy.

“Wooohhf.” It mimicked, and the human went silent for a moment, the scent of fear quickly retreating. Her head thumped against its shoulder as if in defeat.

“Of course you’re a fucking wolf. Shapeshifting canine. Can cut through iron. Way too strong and resilient for its size. How did I not- How did it take me this long to realize? How did it take seeing you literally steal another being's body part for me to figure it out?" She breathed out, her body going completely limp against its back.

Then, she got oddly spirited as it continued blankly staring at her, unbeknownst to her.

"Well no, I know how, you’re way too smart and friendly and cute if you ignore all those times you were about to rip my throat out back at the staircase, and then there’s the whole supposed to be fucking extinct thing- and aren't you supposed to be like, psychotically aggressive and constantly hungry? How did you even get down here? I mean it doesn't matter to me that you're a legendary predatory monster, but what the actual fuck is- I’m just talking to myself at this point aren’t I?” The human groaned out miserably, letting out an odd, frustrated sob into its shoulder, and the wolf…

Honestly it had no idea what the human was going on about, so it just turned back towards the rusty door and kept walking as the human continued making rapid noises at it, going from heated whispers to rapid hissing, to wildly gesticulating with her hand as if trying to point at a…vague… something?

But she was blind. What was she even…

Whatever.

His human made even less sense than her kin, it felt like.

At least the door crumpled like wet paper from their combined weight as they made their way out into the tunnels again.

-

(If you are reading this story on any website that isn’t RoyalRoad.com, you are reading stolen content from a free site that runs no intrusive or obnoxious advertisements. Just google "RoyalRoad Fleabag" and you'll get to my story on the site it was meant to be hosted on.)