The floor underneath its paws was sticky and grimy, dust mixing with dried oils and grease, barrels of the stuff being left lying on the ground at random intervals. As it continued through the darkness, a more complete picture formed in its mind.

If it used its imagination, it could almost fill humans into the image, doing… human stuff. Using and fiddling with all the benches of machinery, empty carts full of broken glass, stray, rotting wires, and tools that were strewn about randomly around the colossal pyramid-like machines, each of them about fifteen humans tall and half as wide, with a large pipe on their tip that traveled upwards, assumedly up to the top.

The room in general was a strange mixture of busy and empty.

Busy because of the small things littering the - for the most part - sticky floor, but empty due to how easily things were dwarfed by the machines, making everything else, including the wolf, feel small and insignificant. The complex machinery underneath the very floor it was walking on only added to that feeling.

The grid-like arrangement made everything feel too purposeful to be discarded the way they were, and its curiosity itched for an answer as to why the humans left this place.

It hoped that answer was a terribly boring one.

Its attention was split between observing its surroundings, and the fact that it couldn’t deny that the deafening silence, only broken by distant echoes of sound, was mildly disturbing.

Thankfully, [Echoes of Oblivion] made stomping around for a better feel absolutely silent, so the nagging paranoia of lurking predators in the darkness, waiting for a noise to pounce on, was easily circumvented. The veins on its back unfortunately didn’t have any mana veins going through them, so the human was uncovered by the silence, and it didn’t particularly want to try pushing the Skill in that direction lest it feel that intensely uncomfortable sensation of mana veins being forcefully created again.

It could probably do that next time it stopped for a rest, anyway, even if it mentally chastised itself for not thinking of doing that until just now.

Its maximum range of vibration senses seemed to be around a hundred and fifty feet without any boosts from the human - who was a little busy uselessly throwing her mana out into the open air for some reason - and about a hundred if it wasn’t stomping down with enough force to jostle the human around. With [Tremor Sense], about another thirty feet was added to its sensory range.

So when it finally felt the wall parallel with the doors they’d gone through, with only vague mental calculations to go with and a hazy visualization in its mind, it estimated the ceiling to be about… two hundred feet, and the walls about four hundred feet apart, while the sides were of an unknown width.

Some kind of rectangular room again. Humans sure loved those. Unless this was some kind of hallway, which… would make this structure a little bigger than the wolf was comfortable assuming it could be.

As it walked along rows of workbenches, pipes and various miscellaneous discards, it realized another problem.

“Hhhaaaasstthe.” It growl-hissed to the human, who startled, before tapping its neck and going back to wasting her mana for some bizarre reason it could probably never understand.

There was no exit it could feel anywhere on the wall, and even its hardest stomps, which made the human yelp and hiss in reprimand, could only barely feel along a few feet on the edge of the ceiling. The human didn’t give it a very strong boost this time.

Still, no way out.

But, operating on simple logic, the humans had to get down here some way, so it walked up to the wall, and decided to follow it, turning to the right.

Fifteen minutes of walking through the same repeating grid of machines, with the only difference being the random stuff thrown about and how many of them there were, it realized how humans would get down here, and let out a long, weary exhale as the vibrations outlined the first irregularity it had felt in the gargantuan wall.

Those moving lifts the humans used.

It was a cubic shaped platform made of metal, sixty feet wide and seemingly dug into the wall behind a grid of metal bars on the front, likely so the humans would be able to see it come down, when it was still operational.

And judging by the way said platform had broken off the rails at two of its corners and was hanging at a tilted angle thirty feet off the floor, it certainly wasn’t operational now, even if the human could figure out how to start one up.

The wolf slowly sat on its haunches, taking care not to move the human’s legs too much as it sat silent in deep thought.

The human’s hand petted its head between its ears as she asked it something, likely feeling the sudden change in demeanor and it simply let out a grumpy grumble in reply, wanting to think in silence. Thankfully, she didn’t ask again, just rubbing along the rim of its ears as it lost itself in thought.

It could attempt to just… climb up the metal shaft. The walls were rusty, but thick and sturdy. Additionally, the x-shaped, interlocking rods of metal evenly spaced along the platform’s framework provided the wolf with a good spot to rest. A scary spot, but a good one. Stable and wide enough to not have to dig into the wall.

The ‘scary’ part was the main reason it was hesitating.

The wolf was tough, far tougher than before, but there was absolutely no chance of it surviving a two hundred feet drop if something went wrong up there. Maybe even if it used the human as a meat cushion.

It could just keep walking and try to find some other exit. Maybe even walk into one of those pyramid machines and just crawl up until it got to the top through the pipe.

But it just wanted to get out of here as soon as possible.

It wasn’t going to pretend that it was unaffected by the environment. Its mind felt numb from the smell, the distant, rhythmic vibrations travelling through the floor felt disturbingly like the beating of a heart, the pipes and machine-work it felt all around them felt like observing the arteries of a comatose titan, the dead silence of the gargantuan room felt unnatural and disquieting, and having such a small radius of sight made its brain always wonder what was just beyond its reach, paranoid thoughts wondering if something was always lurking at the edges, staring at them.

Also, colors. It wanted to see more of them.

It continued to waver between two choices for almost thirty, silent minutes, despite a rising desire to just pick something and get on with it.

To climb up the shaft or just go off and try to find some other exit. Both had risks and their benefits.

Eventually, it decided to first test if it could actually support both its own and the human’s weight before picking either.

It simply walked up to the smooth metal wall to its left, and slowly extended the slime from its upper paws, supporting their weight with its hind legs before jumping up and sticking them to the wall as well, one at a time.

Surprisingly, it could support both of them without too much issue.

Then, it sort of just… wiggled from side to side, trying to get a feel for how resilient the slime was, how much more strain it could handle.

Turns out, it had been underestimating the mucus quite a bit. It felt like it could carry another half of a human without concern.

After carefully detaching, making sure to waste as little slime as possible, it sat still for another minute, just thinking, and then decided to just go with the platform’s shaft.

It had resting stops, it was basically right next to the wolf, just a hundred or so feet away, and hopefully, it would be very tall, perfect for getting them both to the surface.

It just had to not think about the very lethal drop waiting down below if it messed up, but it was rather used to that, living in a place like the human’s nest. Every other railing usually had a death drop right outside it.

“Hhaaandh.” It growl-hissed to the human, and she gave it her wrist without a word. It gently bit down on it, and then tilted its jaw down until her hand was on its chest, pressing her palm into it by letting go and trapping it between its bottom jaw and its collarbone. Then it straightened, satisfied that the human was keeping her hand there.

“Chuuheest.”

“... Chest? Like… hold onto it?” The human asked, tightening her hand into its fur, and it let out a low bark-chuff in approval of her understanding its intent.

Moving its forelegs with her arm flopping about everywhere was only mildly annoying, but it didn’t want any obstructions when it would be having the most tedious climb of its life.

With a light stretch of preparation, it started its trot towards the platform, observing what it had to deal with.

The underside of the platform was a mess of broken steel beams, bent gears and torn open metal cables. Rotting fabrics, metals, and some kind of… pneumatic pressure system nestled into the platform’s underside, almost like the insect’s but mechanical, inert and empty of whatever powered it. Under the platform was a cube-shaped hole in the floor for the platform to sink into and be levelled with the floor, about four or five feet deep and covered with some protruding open pipes that looked like they were meant to slot into the platform when it lowered.

The wall of metal bars on the front of the open platform shaft stopped just twenty feet off the ground, more than ten feet below the platform itself, so the wolf would have to go under the platform, climb up to its tilted edge, then clamber on top of it before it could start the actual climb.

And it got an idea, pausing to wiggle its ‘fingers’ against the dusty metal floor.

It could give itself fully functional human fingers and just… climb using the bars. That would be so much faster than using the slime and shimmying up the giant platform shaft. And once it was done, it could just revert the change.

Additionally, the bars were thick. Just a bit thicker than the human’s wrist, gaunt as it may be, and with the room’s relatively low humidity, they weren’t all that rusty.

It would have to take a nap soon, it seemed.

With a rough plan in mind, it resumed its trot. The iron bars passed above them as the wolf hopped down into the cubic depression in the floor, prompting a surprised yelp from the human and a tightening of her hold. Then, they walked into the thicket made of cables.

The wolf felt the human tense as a stray, inert wire brushed against her back, before throwing mana around and relaxing.

Maybe that’s what she was doing? Stress relief? Strange.

It largely ignored the wires for the most part, just letting them harmlessly brush against its body, only pausing to brush aside some who looked like they could tangle the wolf and be a nuisance. It carefully avoided any of the bent, rickety bits of metal that were supporting the platform, not wanting to disturb them whatsoever.

It was in no mood to be flattened by a few tons of metal.

Considering, however, that the platform was tilted at a thirty degree downwards angle towards the back right corner, and the platform was fairly snug to the bars on the front, it would have to brush past those parts to get to the only corner where the platform was accessible from.

And it did, carefully punching the floor every once in a while to feel for the weakest parts, making sure to stay away from them, winding a zig-zagging path through hanging wires, having to occasionally stop to cut through some tangled mess of cables to progress.

Caution paid its dues despite taking longer, and they arrived at the corner unharmed.

Finding a flat enough surface to stick its paws onto was a bit of a challenge, as the edges of the framework surrounding that platform on three sides were full of holes, rails and indentations for the platform’s up-and-down movement, but a foot-wide section of the massive iron supports was just flat enough for the wolf to begin its ascent, even though its wrists were almost close enough to be touching.

The ascent itself was just tedious.

Even when it wasn’t all that concerned with preserving as much mucus as possible, it still took around seven seconds for a single step. And to properly progress for that entire step’s worth of distance, it had to repeat that process, one by one, across four different legs.

Every foot of distance took around thirty seconds to climb. And it would be even slower if it was trying to conserve as much mucus as possible for a longer climb.

It would take genuine ages to climb up the shaft this way. The ‘Roof-Tumor’ insect could do each step in just one second, but the wolf just didn’t have that much experience with the veins yet, and it was not going to test its limits in this place. Climbing the bars was the only real, viable option it had now that it realized just how slow it was.

To deal with the dust, it would just be using tiny bursts of [Sonic Blast] to clear things up, both to conserve mucus and give itself a better hold.

Its nose was going to be so itchy.

After almost fifteen minutes of slowly inching upwards as the human’s breathing deepened, likely due to nervousness, it sucked back the slime from around a hind paw, and flared the antennae just above the flesh pocket, tapping the cold metal with a sticky paw and letting the organs brush along the clean parts of the metal.

The platform was right above them.

It was a spacious fit, around six feet between the bent pieces of metal making up the platform and the human on its back.

Another couple feet of very slowly inching up the metal, and it made its first deviation from the upwards path, shimmying diagonally to the side to get on top of on one of the horizontal, rectangle-like rods that framed the giant metal ‘x’.

It idly wondered what the purpose of that odd design was. Just a repeating pattern of four iron rods with a metal ‘x’ in the middle, each ‘block’ about thirty feet tall. It just seemed like a waste of metal. Not that there was any shortage of that in the human nest, but still. Maybe structural support?

And then it remembered that trying to understand humans was nothing but a headache, and focused back on its task, eventually managing to hang onto the left leg of the ‘x’, and swing its hindlegs onto the metal rod supporting it underneath while its forelegs remained on the diagonal support rod.

A very arduous couple minutes of shimmying into the wedge having formed where the ‘x’ and the rod met, and it finally considered it safe enough to try detaching for a rest.

However, having the human hanging off its back had its balance so uneven that it didn’t feel safe detaching even then, sticking its right foreleg to the support rod next to its hind legs as its left remained on the top part of the wedge.

Which had the human precariously hanging over the gap, and a thirty five feet drop. It hesitated, mentally wondering if it would have enough strength left over in its tired limbs to swing the human into safety, where she wouldn’t be tugging the wolf towards said drop.

“Hhhaaastte.” It growled, the first sounds exchanged between them during the entire climb, and she obliged, giving it a sizable boost that made its tired limbs feel as light as a feather.

Not energised, just… lighter. It was a strange sensation.

Then it activated [Bloodrush] and quickly retracted the veins into the squishy sheath of flesh on the back of its paw, the slime quickly losing cohesion.

The second its paw detached, the wolf swung it around its chest and under its waist with as much strength as it could muster, using its left hindleg to pull itself back by curling inwards, and its right foreleg to push down, tilting its back towards the left with all its strength. Then it hooked its left forelegs’ nails into the iron, and pulled, assisting its back in tilting.

With a low snarl of effort, a lot slower than it would have liked, it swung the human on top of its back properly, her left shoulder smacking into the iron wall along with its own.

Then it retracted all of the veins on its paws, slumping down onto the support rod like a corpse with a faint wheeze as its chest and bottom jaw hit the metal with faint, muffled thumps and a click from where its venom fangs hit the iron.

It didn’t even care that its right forelegs’ forearm was dangling off the rod. It was tired.

Still, after a minute of catching its breath, it got up and walked along the rod with careful steps until it was certain that even if they fell off, the platform below would catch them, then plopped down again, adjusted its body so that the human was leaning against the wall for their combined safety, stuck its left foreleg onto the metal wall just for added safety, and promptly went to sleep.

[Restful Awareness]’s high Level thankfully allowed it to keep the slime sticky without issue as it dove into [Devourer] after brushing aside the system’s updates. It quickly fashioned itself two human hands, complete with thumbs and furless paws for more friction with the metal it was going to be climbing.

These were also changes it wasn’t planning on keeping, so it made sure to make the hands as big as shovels, with tendons so thick they might as well be cables, moving its dewclaw from the side of its wrist onto the thumb.

It considered the essence spent on them as an investment more than anything. The more time it wasted in the nest’s abandoned innards, the more essence it would lose. Besides, it didn’t really need to run anywhere so far, and humanoid hands would be far more useful for traversing these unfamiliar environments and grappling with opponents.

And when it got somewhere where it could run and its comfort during walking mattered, it would just turn them back to normal.

As it fell asleep, it impassively read the system’s updates, before retreating back into its lucid sleep.

-[Tough Skin] has Leveled Up. Level 4 → Level 5

-[Echoes of Oblivion] has Leveled Up. Level 4 → Level 5

-[Tremor Sense] has Leveled Up. Level 3 → Level 4

-[Logotexnia] has Leveled Up. Level 4 → Level 5

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