With a long exhale of impatience, it focused on the search group under the pipe it was resting within, waiting for them to walk out of the tight corridor they were shuffling through and out into the brick lip that surrounded the bizarre cycling room.

As it did so, it thought about how being able to feel almost four hundred feet in all directions without even paying much attention or putting any effort in, from a mixture of its vibrational senses and [Tremor Sense], it was…

It was an awareness so immeasurably comforting that it filled the wolf with this sense of bone-deep safety. It would always know if someone was coming, where they were coming from, how heavy and tall they were, read their stance to know if they were coming after it or just wandering. It felt like an omniscient creature, almost.

The three humans, clad in coverings and basically vibrating with nervousness, jabbered and hiss-barked at each other as they tensely walked in a line on the thin, crumbling brickwork, eyes twitching amongst the ominous ruins to their right.

The wolf didn’t pay much attention to them, despite the strangeness of seeing something like a mangled temple made of bricks sitting in the middle of a sump, its crumbling remnants half-filled and being worn away by chemicals and waste.

Three hundred feet to its left, in parallel pipes and through at least three walls, it felt two groups talking to each other through their mechanical talk-pads.

Below, three confident and well-armored humans walked with practiced, meaningless stealth through the crumbling innards of a control room, likely trying to find ways to cut off its escape paths into as few places as possible, funnel it into a predictable path.

They couldn’t set traps down here, but they could try to corral it into predictable spots when it inevitably went through the sewers and came out on the other side, and that would be where it assumed they’d set the actual traps, or so it assumed. Because the best moment to strike was always when one's guard was down,

They wouldn’t succeed.

It waited until the three humans were almost right below it, and activated [Echoes of Oblivion], feeling the Skill’s soft, coiled fingers wrap around it in a comforting, eddying motion. It grabbed onto the lip of the pipe and carved out a large, triangular piece of heavy iron.

Then it handed it to one of its tails, and whipped it away with all its strength at the stone ruins, the massive metal fan whirring away at the center under the waters.

It crouched, head tilted down to stare at the humans, reveling in the idle waft of fear it could pick out from underneath the cloying scent of aging trash water, while the eye in the base of its neck stared at the flying piece of iron. A moment later, it slammed into stone with enough force to echo in the room ten times over, and one of the humans, the middle one, squeaked, pulling a sharp blade-

A sword, the ether told it.

Pulling a sword out, and blindly aiming it towards the hazy outlines of the forgotten building, arm shaking.

With their backs to the wolf, right below it, sitting on a three foot wide piece of crumbling brick walkway while just three feet below them waste waters trickled away, they had no chance.

It could just tilt its forearm down, and, assuming they didn't have a lot of points in Endurance, put a spike through the top of their heads. It might take less than a second to kill them all.

They smelled and felt like…

The humans in the lift.

Their morale was horrid, too. Two were frozen, the third in the middle looked and smelled ready to faint.

It could probably kill them all instantly. But it didn’t want to do that. It wanted something more than just essence out of this encounter.

Besides, the humans hunting it seemed to put more worth into quantity rather than quality, and that was just fine by the wolf. More essence for itself. [Devourer] never stopped being hungry, and by extension, neither did the wolf, no matter how good it usually was at suppressing it. Now? Without even essence in storage? It felt hollow. Cold and empty, unsure. It hated the feeling.

Still, it kept its patience. Somewhat.

It hooked its nails into the iron pipe, swung its body down, and stared at them through the gap between its legs as it hung in place.

Then it dropped, legs curled to its stomach and arms wide.

It waited until it was only a foot or two above the quivering human in the middle before it whipped its tails to coil around the necks of the two men on either side of him. Before any of them could react, its legs unwound like a spring, and slammed into the scared man’s skull with a gut-wrenching crack that caved in his skull ever so slightly, instantly knocking him out.

His forward leaning posture made him jerk and crumple down like a folding piece of paper, right where the wolf was trying to land, and the wolf had to hurriedly jerk its feet up again, mid-fall, to land on his back, surprised by how easily its weight and strength did such damage.

Damn it. It hadn’t even meant to do that. It shouldn't have aimed for the soft spot of the skull.

It didn’t waste time with the other two. The moment its legs landed on the middle man’s body and its hands hit the floor, it tightened its tails, one far more than the other. The left one's windpipe was crushed instantly with a fleshy crunch and a gurgling sound, his hands fisting in its fur and trying to peel its tail off with surprising strength and ferocity, his lantern hitting the ground and starting to flicker, damaged.

Which was not the plan, because that was the tail it hadn't been tightening at full strength.

The one to its right, a stockier, bigger human, let out a choked gag, jerked and swung his sword at the wolf’s tail with as much speed as he could muster, and the wolf mourned the loss of a couple dozen hairs as it watched the sword bounce off and leave the human’s grip from resistance he was likely not expecting, tumbling into the waters.

That swing was either really weak or its fur was made of iron by now, because it barely felt anything. It sincerely hoped for the latter.

It was also rather surprised that this human hadn't met the same fate as his kin, especially with how much effort the wolf had put into snapping his neck. It felt like it was trying to crack a support beam in twain.

It didn't mean to crush the fragile one's windpipe, it had just underestimated its own strength, but the one on its right at least had some decent points into Endurance, it seemed. Which was good, because it needed at least one of them alive, and the unconscious one...

The dent in his head was a little too deep for the wolf to have much hope of coherence from him, even if he did wake up.

It jerked the fragile one back, ignoring his frantic, surprisingly painful struggles, and dragged him off the brick lip that lined this bizarre chamber before dunking him into the water. It stepped off the unconscious human, kicking his body to the side, flush against the wall.

Then it turned off [Echoes of Oblivion] as it calmly trotted up to the edge of the brickwork and curled up, hands stacked atop each other under its snout as it stared at the fragile human’s struggling form beneath the water, felt the gentle thumps of his fists beating at its tail as it held him down. Judging by the speed of said thumps, that was where he'd put most of his Attribute points, assuming he had access to them, which it still wasn't sure about.

The tough one continued to struggle, and the wolf let him exhaust himself, tugging him closer or away from itself whenever he tried to advance or do anything but pluck hair out of its tail, tightening its tail whenever he tried to scream or call for help.

That tough one, he had common sense. What good would Speed or Strength do if he'd gotten his neck snapped before he could even react?

If he had common sense, maybe he would be easier to communicate with too. It felt quite lucky.

It opened the eye on its left hip, staring blankly at the tough human, and it smelled his fear spike suddenly. It filled the air, the scent faint but bittersweet.

The eye roved over him to land on a familiar metallic device, and the tentacle in its back dug itself out of its pouch before whipping forward. The human jerked and stiffened even further as the speaking tablet clattered to the floor, his hip coverings cut and frayed along the string that held the blocky thing up.

It curled its tentacle into a spiral, bone-blade pointing straight at the device, before spearing forward and through it, bone tip embedded into stone. With a violent flick, the wolf threw it into the waters, just for good measure.

Its attention returned to its temporary toy, still struggling under the murk.

The fragile human was already dead, really, what with his crushed windpipe, and his struggle only making him exhaust himself quicker.

But the wolf was not in a merciful mood.

So, just to mess with him further, it began jerking him around randomly, pushing down then pulling up and randomly going left or right, preventing him from mustering his wits or any sense of balance as he flailed about desperately.

The human lasted about twenty seconds before he went limp, and the wolf twisted its tail until it felt a satisfying pop-crack reverberate through its flesh as his neck snapped. Just in case. That done, it dragged his corpse out of the water, dumping it by its side before vigorously shaking the appendage to get rid of the water soaking the fur in a sort of twitchy wagging motion.

That was… cathartic. It felt good. It felt fun.

It knew that playing with its food was fun. It had learned it a long time ago, from the rodents back in the pit when it had gotten bored of killing them or eating the dead ones.

It just hadn’t quite realized how incredibly fun it was, when it genuinely hated its prey too.

Because yes, it had gone past just being upset at the humans trying to capture it when certain realizations came to it as it prowled through the tunnels and thought of recent events.

Not only had they almost gotten it killed or captured a dozen times by now in just the past week, refusing to just leave it alone, the reasoning it suspected for their actions was infuriating.

It had debated lighting one of them on fire as it choked them to muffle or choke out their screams, but it didn’t feel like burning its tail fur by trying that, and it liked its food uncooked and fresh, preferably.

More painful for the human trash that thought they could control it, but too much of an annoyance for the wolf to bother.

If this whole hunt was about the humans eating it, it wouldn’t even think twice about it. That's the way things worked. It was natural, normal. Why would it hate something just trying to eat and survive? That was literally the wolf itself, until recently.

No, it hated them because they didn’t have any interest in that. Much like the rats, psychotic little things they were. The rats were frenzied mindless nuisances. The humans… or rather, these humans…

It had reviewed that chaotic mess of a fight it had gone through almost a week ago, and it slowly became apparent that very few of the attacks launched at it were lethal in any way. Ropes, nets, paralytic poison, which its immune system had grown a little better at combating, as a side note, then light-nets connected to arrows...

They were trying to capture it alive.

Which ruled out the possibility of them wanting revenge, or trying to extinguish a threat as a result of it killing their kin, like that female down by the burning rivers. They either somehow didn't know or didn't care.

From what little it knew, and ruling that possibility out, it had to assume they wanted it leashed and commanded like those of its kin it had seen, dragged by a leash. It, and only it. It couldn’t fathom any of them going to such lengths for a regular canine. And the only thing unique about the wolf was that it was not a regular canine. It all clicked.

Which meant, they knew it was a wolf, or at least knew of how potentially powerful it could be, and thus wanted it as a… a tool, weapon, or some… subservient of some kind.

A pet, the ether clarified, and it felt its lips curl into a soundless snarl as its fur bristled across its back.

And that reason, the reason the humans were hunting it with such fervor and numbers, that pissed it off a lot more than if they’d just been trying to fill their stomachs.

As if he had some kind of second wind, the human planted his feet to the ground, and abruptly yanked back with all his strength and body weight, actually moving the wolf a little.

It tilted its tail, a light twist and jerk, and in the blink of an eye, three thin, barbed spikes were pressing into the human’s neck, just shy of breaking skin. Its low warning growl mixed with the human’s heaving breaths as he froze, slowly lifting his hands off the tail, holding them up by his side, palms open and empty, his fear churning into that bitter scent of terror.

Its chest still burned with low, seething contempt as it dragged the tougher human’s body to its knees behind it, letting its tail slacken enough for the red-faced man to gasp in heaving breaths without worrying about self-impalement, his wide, terrified eyes nailed to its waving tentacle.

It opened the eye on its left hip to stare at him, and the human's skin turned almost bone-white as his eyes jerked to it, tentacle momentarily forgotten.

His hands began to shake.

It felt a surge of satisfaction at this situation. It felt so nice, to be feared for once.

Just to add to it, it slowly undulated the tentacle’s spikes in the air as it got up and turned to face him. It flattened the tentacle against its back again, wiggling it back into its sheath, out of sight.

Its second tail wrapped around the neck of the human it had killed, dragging his dripping corpse to sit next to itself, half of it on top of his unconscious kin's body. Its secondary arms unwound and extended to the sides, and the human out an inarticulate whimper-sob kind of sound at the sight, leaning back as much as the spikes on his neck would allow.

With a twist, it folded the spikes flat against its tail again, not wanting its captive to accidentally or purposefully kill himself, then tightened the tail again and sat down on its haunches, face to face.

The size difference was significantly smaller than it was used to. It was nice to be getting bigger. The human was on its knees, but still.

It formed a fist with its left secondary hand, before extending the pointer finger to point at the dead human’s head.

“Hheeeeaaaad.” It growl-whine-snarled with minimal assistance from [Logotexnia], and the human’s eyes widened significantly, looking like they were about to pop out of their sockets. It looked almost painful.

Then, it twined its fingers around the corpse’s head fur, pulling its slack face off the floor.

It pointed at the hair itself with its right-hand pointer finger, and used [Logotexnia] to imbue a vaguely inquisitive feeling into its following chuff. It was obvious. It was a sound that sounded questioning. So the human should know it was asking a question. It was easy.

“W-w-w-w-what?” The human squeaked out.

Or not, because that was not what the ‘what’ sound meant. It wasn’t sure what it meant, beyond being used for questions, but it didn't mean that. Emree-eel would say ‘what’ all the time, but never to bring attention to her head fur.

It growled, making him flinch and grimace. It shook the head for emphasis, dragging the corpse forward then raising it a little more, and used its right-hand finger to poke at the hair directly.

It chuffed again, questioning.

The human swallowed audibly, once, twice.

“H-h-head?” He eked out.

It used to have a lot more patience than this.

As it was, it simply let out a short snarl of frustration, letting its teeth show, ignoring the human’s sob-whimper, and slammed the head down into the bricks below with a muted crunch as its face flattened.

It caught itself, and took a deep breath to calm down, then leaned back a little, waiting for the human’s eyes to open again.

After four seconds of silence, they did, the human timidly staring at its main hands that still sat on the floor, and so it pointed at the corpse’s back with its humanoid arm, again.

“Chuheesssst.” It chuff-hiss-whined.

It pointed at the human’s legs.

“Lheeehg” It growl-whined.

It pointed back to the head.

The human was still just staring at its main arms like he was about to pass out, uncomprehending, not lifting his eyes beyond glancing at whatever the wolf was pointing at.

No eye contact. A show of submission. Which was good, but not what the wolf was looking for.

“Hheeaaad.” It snarled.

Then, it grabbed the corpse by its head fur again, and used its other hand’s pointer finger to very specifically tap at the strands it was holding the body up by.

It let out the same questioning chuff.

“I- h-hair?” The man warbled out through the tears in his eyes, his rough voice not well suited to the tones, and the wolf tilted its head at the new sound, dissecting it.

“Hhh…aaaairrr.” It growl-wheeze-snarled.

The human jerked his head up and down frantically, some weird gesture it couldn’t parse the meaning of.

The eyes on its right side opened, and stared at the ruins.

There were plenty of things here to point to and learn the name of. And this human had eyes, unlike Emree-eel.

Time to see how much knowledge it could wring out of him before turning him into essence.

Three hours and a lot of frustration later, it couldn’t say it was... entirely disappointed.

It knew from the [Devourer] Skill that there were differences in what humans called a ‘forearm’ and a ‘wrist’, so it knew what to look for. It just didn’t know the sounds the humans used for specific body places yet.

That was mostly where they stumbled upon frustration. The stupid human was stupid, and it took another half hour to even get him to understand what it was trying to learn.

It could say with relative confidence that it could make any sound that referred to most of the human parts by now, with quite a bit of specificity.

It learned how humans called those glass lamps they held, ‘lanterns’, which was oddly pleasing to say. Their coverings had multiple names to refer to them with, again, for no reason. Upper thing was a ‘shirt’, lower was ‘pants’.

It learned that the human didn’t know what to call it, making pleading gibberish and making sad yipping noises whenever it would point at itself questioningly. It wasn’t sure if that meant they didn’t know it was a wolf, or if they didn’t know what a wolf was, and thus had no sound for it.

That’s when it began running into difficulties, because human body parts were easy and specific. Environment, apparently, was not.

Pointing at the floor made the human give it a dozen different sounds for it, like ‘floor, rock, stone, bricks, ground, pleaseletmegoplease’ and a bunch of other annoying sounds, all depending on how displeased the wolf looked, as if he was just trying to appease it but didn’t know what exactly it wanted.

Even though what it wanted was rather clear and simple.

That was roughly when it gave up and decapitated him. It made sure to eat every shred of them and kick their clothes and equipment off to be carried by the sump waters, then went on the hunt for another team.

Still, it learned plenty. Maybe the next group would be less annoyingly stupid.

It can’t be that hard to just give the same damn answer twice in a row when it points at something.

It was wrong.

The next group was not much better. It learned how they called their blades, their belts and buckles, their foot coverings. Their metal speaking device. The ‘comms tablet’.

Ugh. its thoughts were getting all muddied by it using the human sounds in its own head when thinking of stuff now. It was endlessly annoying, to have its thoughts start shifting from… thinking in images and concepts and objects, to sounds. Why did the humans do this to themselves? It was so much harder to think this way, so much noisier, in a weird way.

So bizarre.

Still, it wished to understand human speech. If not to use it to communicate with them, then at least so it could extract information from them and figure out why they were such complete, nonsensical, suicidal creatures. Maybe ask them questions about the Symbols. What this stupid mana thing was, how it could better control it so it would be able to do the amazing things its Path vision showed it, like devouring spears with blankets of void.

The more it thought, the more questions popped up, and much to its displeasure, it knew that the humans were its best chance of getting asnwers. Meaning that the wolf would have to know how to ask and understand the given answers, if it wanted to satisfy its curiosity.

By the third group it realized that no such things was likely to happen anytime soon. The damn sounds they used were all so… varied. It started to cross-reference what the humans agreed on, just to understand if the ground below its feet was ‘rock’ or ‘stone’, if it was ‘ground’ or ‘floor’.

It was leaning towards ‘stone’ . Two out of three score on that one.

The lessened gnaw of hunger in its stomach and soul was a light balm upon its frustration, but it was enough to make the wolf realize that it had stocked up on enough maintenance for a about a week.

Thus, it decided to hurry out of this metal plate’s innards, focusing on vibrations, periodically activating [Bloodrush] to extend its range.

As easy as prowling these rather desolate tunnels was, despite the slowly increasing number of rodents, it could actually feel itself getting more impatient and irritable, hour by hour as it descended.

There was no reason for it. It really could not understand why it felt this way. No amount of silent introspection helped.

Maybe that odd sense of inner panic, of needing to change, was not something derived from its subconscious dissatisfaction, but its frustration at something it couldn’t locate? It really didn’t know.

As it descended deeper, the humans lessened more and more, until it could only feel two groups of six, moving through the tunnels with a purpose and determination that let it know it should probably avoid them. They were not patrolling, however, just following a predetermined path through the tunnels. Very quickly, might it add. Very violently too, because the inhabitants of this place did not enjoy their trampling steps.

It also began running into more and more bizarre things as it got closer to the middle of the plate’s innards, and deeper down, near the underside of the metal plate, it felt said bizarre things lessen, as if all the strangeness was contained within the middle of the tunnel network.

Why? How?

It was dying to know. One thing it seldom managed to refrain itself from following was its own curiosity.

The bizarre things it saw were… both locations and creatures.

The first thing it had felt was the faint sensation of an elongated, humanoid creature with its legs fused together, made of sludgy flesh and fat, briefly scraping at a wall before vanishing back into the waters, where the wolf lost it.

It didn’t even want to investigate that one, despite how morbidly fascinated it was by the creature.

The second one was some kind of... mass of dozens of chitinous legs and spikes and hooks the size of four humans, making some kind of... nest, or something, covered in squishy bits. The wolf actively avoided that one.

Locations were... dizzying, and far too many. Control rooms that were for some reason, upside down. A small room filled with coffins and rotted skeletons. It even saw something like some... crypt, covered in metal, twisted statues.

It didn't explore those either. Not much point in it.

The only odd location it decided to visit was an inert pump room which was basically already in its general path. Judging from vibrations, it had been turned into a human’s living space. This far down, that was a bit bizarre.

When it finally got to it, the door was made of something strange like… paper, painted and covered to camouflage into the surrounding metal wall, and it would have worked if the wolf didn’t have vibrations to see through it.

Witness of Divinity also just told it the wall was fake, but still.

The door didn’t really open so much as it just crumbled into a wet, rotten heap at its feet with the lightest shove, the wires holding it in place just snapping from the shift in weight, rusted through completely.

It walked in, and swerved its head around. The room was a perfect cube, about thirty feet big, and still felt cramped.

There was a point where there was so little light that even night vision was meaningless, and this room definitely reached that point.

It spewed a small line of flame onto the floor, next to its foot, and wandered forward.

The smell was… horrid, even for the sewers. It was rotten flesh and decay mixing with a miasma that it could actually taste, like rotten flesh and dried, ancient paint that never aired out of the room, until now.

In the left corner, some mass of rotten pillows and feathers and fabrics, almost like a bird’s nest. Crates flanked the odd nest’s right side, some wooden and crumbling, some metal and dented inwards.

Still, enough survived to give the room a very strange feeling. An odd sense of importance and untouchable-ness, as if it was in a place it shouldn’t, an invader of a sanctum with no guardian.

It ignored it, because it was curious.

In the right corner, it saw and felt the corpse of a human, half machine and half a rotten skeleton, curled up into a ball in the corner as it lay amongst the broken fragments of a mirror, one large, dirty piece clutched in its right hand in a reverse grip, limp on the floor, the other still clutching where its hair might once have been.

Rotten pieces of paper lay on the nest and around the body, haphazardly discarded, thin and withered, but it could gleam some kind of mess of human squiggly lines in their yellow-brown bodies if it squinted.

To its left, there was just a gigantic pile of…. Fabric and wood and paint, crushed and melted together as if by acid all the way up to the ceiling. There was even dried paint on the floor, covering almost half of it in a chaotic blotch of colors.

To its right, two giant pumps rusted away, taking up about a fifth of the room in total, their pipes burrowing into the middle of the wall.

And leaned against them was a bizarre assortment of… metal cans filled with brushes, glass canisters on rotten wooden benches, strange three-legged stands which supported a long line of rotting… fabric, it looked like, stretched over wooden, rectangular frames, so decayed that the wolf feared the entire line would slump down into wet chunks should it breathe too hard in their direction.

It breathed another small jet of fire to its right, and the extra light made its eyes widen as they fixed upon the fabric again.

Canvas, the ether whispered, and the wolf didn’t need to be told what it was used for, staring curiously at the faces painted onto the fabric, each the same but progressively changing with each new picture, seven of them in total.

It trotted up to the first one in line, the left one, recognizable by the simple fact it seemed to be the oldest one.

It was an extremely detailed painting of a single man with a receding hairline and tired eyes, his face lit by what seemed to be candlelight. Behind him, the wolf could idly recognize the door it had just pushed through, a lumpy mess of painted cardboard-like material. It assumed that this painting was the human drawing himself. What for, it didn’t know nor try to understand.

It was… oddly pleasing to the eye, even if with age, the paint had cracked and splintered and lost most of its color, giving an oddly eerie feel to the picture.

The second picture was like the first, except… sloppier. The shadows were lengthier, the human’s features a little lopsided. His smile looked worried. The improved condition told the wolf there was likely something like months or years between each piece, which didn't make much sense either, but it ignored it for the moment.

The third was… not the same person. The colors were difficult to parse under fire light, but they were a little off. The human’s jaw and features were more like a lumpy mask clipped onto a human’s deformed head, rather than the carefully rendered strokes of paint it saw in the first one.

His smile was too wide, one eye too bright while the other was just splashed over with black paint, like a hole in his face.

It was like the human’s skill was actively regressing. If it wasn’t for the visible improvement on the paint’s condition as it moved along, it would have assumed it began its observation on the wrong side, going backwards.

The fourth painting looked angry and sort of desperate. It was all reds and straight lines, spikes and angles and no curves, forming a jagged oval shape with the barest suggestion of human features. The mouth was an open pit in this one, the color of his mouth pure black. The picture looked as if a human was being flayed alive and screaming.

It was both… confused, and mildly intrigued.

The easiest and most logical explanation it could come up with was that some strange human went in here, decided to use it as his new home, and slowly started losing his mind.

But why would a human even do that? This place was neither safe nor comfortable to live in. The humidity was grating, even by the human nest's standards.

The fifth painting had some faint return to detail, in that half the face was some malformed, vaguely spiral-textured mess with an eye and a cheek, while the other half-and-something of the face was a bunch of parallel lines like pipes and squiggly… circles.

Were those supposed to be gears?

Well, the human was half-machine from what it could feel, so maybe it was a metaphor for how he… replaced his legs with metal ones?

The sixth drawing was…

Just a black and gray mass of vague shapes, a few hard lines indicating the malformed lumps which it assumed were the edge of a jaw and a shoulder. In the middle of all this, a sloppy white circle remained, with a black, textured dot in the middle, a tiny one in comparison to the wide sphere. It assumed that it was supposed to be an eye. If it was, the eye looked quite terrified.

The seventh drawing was a shredded mess, torn apart.

It tilted its head, going from the first to the last painting again. Then to the human form curled up in the corner to its right.

It walked to the human corpse in the corner, and extended a humanoid arm out to the side, grabbing onto one of his metal legs and dragging the half-mummified corpse out of the corner, straightening the body in the process.

The metal was… odd.

It flared all of its antennae, and tapped the lumpy, dented mess of half-circles with its main arm’s knuckles.

Its ears straightened in surprise.

There was still bone in the metal.

It was crushed and seemed to be almost… assimilated into the iron, with the odd way they were melting into each other, but it was still in there, entrapped and preserved.

If that was a gradual process, it looked really painful.

It thought back to the human who had fought it with a metal arm, and winced as it thought of how much time and pain he must have gone through just to turn his whole arm into metal. It felt a sense of respect for him, actually.

The iron was not exactly uniform on this human, however. It was like… a shell, almost, still clinging onto bits of decayed brown flesh, almost mummified, or melted into the flesh.

Actually, not quite. It looked more like the metal was eating the human alive from the outside, or like the human was growing a shell of metal, except it went from the outside, then inwards. The metal snaked around his hips in a wide, segmented cast, leaving him fully mobile as far as the wolf could tell, but likely in a lot of pain.

Was it all on purpose? Did the humans do this to be stronger?

They were pretty weak without their mana-things.

It couldn’t figure anything out about this strange scene, not beyond speculation.

It just looked like a human decided to live in the tunnels, progressively lost his mind, and killed himself with a piece of a broken mirror in the middle of his changes, for no reason.

Curiosity sated, it turned and walked out of the room, continuing on its way down.