The slime was beyond disgusting. The flavor was a wretched mix of salt and fermented sweetness, but the texture was far worse. Rather than being smooth and clear like jello, the slime’s body was full of stringy, viscous threads, a kind of crude muscle that allowed it to move. He had to rip through them with his teeth to bite the larger chunks down.

But he didn’t stop until it was gone, and he had won.

Bayler felt his world swing round and round with a dizzying kind of nausea, trying to sort his thoughts. Ever since he woke up, there were only brief islands of sanity and calm in a sea of danger. Brief moments where something wasn’t trying to kill him.

And every time his life was in danger, he went a little farther to win. Leaping off the stairwell. Eating the slime. It was like when his life was on the line he went briefly insane, doing things that no normal human would even contemplate.

Both times, it had kept him alive. ‘Refuse death.’ ‘Indomitable determination.’ He’d written off the descriptions of his new abilities as fluff, but maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe there was a mental component to the powers he’d accepted.

Maybe this madness that had kept him alive at all costs was part of the gift this new world had given him.

A new window floated in the air above him, offering another 'present' from these strange announcements that treated life and death like a game.

Glaring at the announcement, he swiped his hand through and thought ‘no’ with all the mental force he could muster. A feral growl echoed through the tiny chamber, and it was a second before Bayler even realized it had been him.

These ‘gifts’ were changing him.

The screen was shattered into shards of light that slowly drifted down, their light fading as they sank through the floor.

He had barely let out a breath when a presence filled the room. It was the undeniable feeling of being watched, that strange, irritating tension, but there was nobody there. He could feel it so acutely it was like a breath on the back of his neck.

The window reformed, the message shifting before his eyes.

“No.” He smashed it into pieces again, but this time the shards shot through the air, circling, aiming sharp geometric points at him. “I said-”

His protests didn’t stop them from stabbing through his chest. The pain was worse this time, thousands of time worse. Where before it was needles, now it was fragments of glass forcing their way through his veins, as hot as coals. They spread outwards from his heart, moving further with each pulse as he fell to the floor, twitching, his limbs refusing to obey as the cold flame reached them.

Phantom words echoed in his head.

|| Indulgence - Bronze - 0% - When you devour, you make the world less and yourself more. Let your appetites rage. When you consume a living monster, gain 10% of its mana. You may spend this mana to transform yourself into that creature. Only the last monster eaten is remembered. ||

Pushed past his limits by the pain, his body already in an exhausted, wounded state, Bayler slipped unconscious without even realizing it-- the pain following him into his dreams.

When he opened his eyes, he wasn’t alone anymore. He floated in a black void, an insignificant speck in a starless night.

Before him, towering up like a mountain, a giant with a pig’s head sat cross-legged. The giant was tremendously fat, with dozens of jeweled pendants hanging from around the rolls of his flabby neck, as big as mountain and made entirely of blubber. As for its head, the gigantic difference in size magnified every detail, from the cracks running down its yellow tusks to the hairs of the wet, snuffling snout. Only the eyes were even vaguely human, shot with bloodred veins the size of rivers.

It opened its mouth, and spoke. A voice that made Bayler think of rotten, slithering meat boomed through the abyssal void. “So, you tried to refuse my blessing, boy.”

“The last one I took turned me into a lunatic!” He shouted up, but his own voice was drowned out, barely even noticed as the pig-god continued to speak,

“A foolish thing to do, turning down power. Still, I like your spirit, so allow me to explain something.”

That enormous head bent down, rotten stale breath sweeping over Bayler and tossing him back like a leaf billowing in the wind.

“You own nothing but your life.”

“It is your last possession. Everything else is dust now, gone now, so hold tight to your little life, do everything to protect it. Go mad if you have to. Take every scrap of power the gods offer you. Arm yourself with every weapon. Fight. Let no one take any more from you than has already been taken.”

“Take my gift, and fight.”

With that final word, Bayler was thrown backwards, flying away at tremendous speed. The enormous pig-headed giant shrank into the distance, becoming no bigger than a normal man, no more than a speck, gone--

And then Bayler was alone again, back in the cramped little cavern of rubble beneath the hospital ruins, the taste of the slime clinging to his tongue.

Not for the first time that day, he felt overwhelmed by the strangeness that had interrupted his life. Worse than being in constant danger, his world was constantly being shaken up, and he felt like a rat in a maze, being toyed with. It made his teeth grind. Giants and gods and fucking game announcements all playing with him.

He needed to get out of here before he went crazy. Crazier.

And as he examined his new skill, turning his arm over to examine the new words that had appeared on the flowering tattoo there, he had an idea of how.

“Indulgence.” He said aloud, to no effect. Frowning, Bayler paused, unsure of how to actually use the power that had been forced on him. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the words, on the tattoo, trying to find some mental button or lever to make things happen.

Eventually he found that when he focused on the words Indulgence, a kind of image formed in his mind. It was a bronze statue, depicting the pig-headed giant in meditation like some kind of absurd Buddha, and the more he repeated the words in his head the clearer it became. The image only grew sharper, more solid, as he layered in the memory of encountering the bloated giant in the void, the smell of its breath, the sound of its awful voice.

The energy, the cold flame, that had invaded his body when he first ‘accepting’ the blessing began to stir, spreading outwards with his breath. With a sudden shiver his body shifted, becoming boneless, soft, his skin melting into a rush of slime.

As the fire burned through every particle of his being, Bayler Shrike melted into a puddle of black goo.

His eyes were gone, and almost all his other senses too, leaving him confined within his own body, a mind in a void. New sensations, alien ones, assaulted him, making him want to groan with confusion. Only he didn’t have a mouth. Tragically, taste was the one sense that remained, and it had shifted to his skin, to the oily outer membrane that enclosed his body.

Imagine your body was a single enormous tongue, dragging itself along the ground to move.

Worse, for lack of other senses he experienced everything with an inhuman concentration, even able to taste a Bayler-shaped shadow of sweat where he had lain on the ground. As he experimented, he found he could throw himself forward by contracting and expanding the snotty strands of ‘muscle’ within his shapeless body, discovering another sense -- a kind of inwards looking touch, the ability to make his soft bulk reshape itself.

Curious, he split a part of himself off, spitting it across the floor. The tiny blob shivered, and rolled itself into a ball, coming bouncing back to merge into him again.

Frustrated, realizing he’d be unable to control the little inkblots, Bayler tried again, this time thinking very hard about a command as he split the mini-slime off. “Find light.”

The blot, as he’d chosen to call them, didn’t come back this time. Without eyes, Bayler was unable to see where it had gone. The closest he had was a dim sense of light hitting his skin, radiating from the window that still floated in the air above where his ‘face’ would be.

He waited, and waited--

There was a sudden pang of emptiness, like how lungs started to burn when you held your breath. The cold flame that Bayler imagined must be Mana was beginning to ebb. With a horrified realization, Bayler realized he hadn’t figured out how to turn himself back--

Crack. Crunch.

Forming bones hurt much worse than losing them. Forming skin, flesh, tissue, was a lot harder than forming a shapeless blob of gelatin. With a series of sickening pops and cracks his joints linked together, pushing out the soft bulk of his slime-body, shaping it roughly human as jellied flesh solidified into muscle.

It happened automatically as he ran out of Mana to fuel his transformation, but that didn’t mean it was easy. The moment he was fully formed except for his skin was the worst. And then it was over, and he lay on the ground, even his clothes - a thin hospital gown - returned to him.

The inkblot was nowhere to be found. Had it been turned back into a disembodied finger, somewhere in the honeycomb of tiny gaps and cracks between the rubble, searching for a way out? Bayler quickly took count to make sure he still had everything.

It was all there. Everything except his Mana, which had died to a tiny, barely-alive spark in his chest. He had barely noticed its presence until it was gone, but now the lack felt as panick-inducing as the need to breathe.

If he was going to escape, he needed more. Enough that the transformation wouldn’t give out halfway up, and leave him wedged into some terrible, claustrophobic position, trapped or worse, simply crushed into a space too small to hold him.

He looked up at the announcement still floating in the air. Select a weapon.

“I need…” He started, and then paused, closing his eyes, ‘speaking’ silently in his head as he reached out. His fingers dipped through the screen of light like they were passing into water. ‘I need a weapon that lures monsters in. Something to bring me prey. Something that casts light, if possible…’

And only because his life depended on it, he added a grudging, ‘Thanks.’

His fingers made contact with cold iron. From the space within the announcement, he pulled a rusty iron lamp, with four glass walls enclosing a pale blue fire. Flickering blue light washed through the tiny space, filling it to the brim. The frame holding each glass pane was wrought into curling designs containing strange runes, and as he looked at them, Bayler felt the phantom words flood into his head, the same way they did with his tattoo.

|| Lamp of Treachery - Iron - Sings a song only monsters can hear, drawing them towards its light. With each life taken, another soul fuels the flame, giving this weapon the potential to climb the Great Chain, with a faint chance of evolving to higher rank.

Souls Absorbed 0/1,000

Speak the word ‘Kesslith’ to call forth a ray of flame. ||

The fourth line of the announcement turned gray and faded out, but the second and third remained. Reaching in again, Bayler drew out a small box of dark wood engraved with dozens of runic marks, and thin steel chain bearing a round, bone-white medallion, a single character carved on each face.

|| Divine Paper - Black - Scatter this blessed paper to the wind to invoke the Powers That Were, rejecting the monstrous energies of the Underworld. Establishes a 10 meter radius that rejects monsters of up to Iron rank. Lasts for twenty four hours. ||

|| Talisman of Reversal - Black - Break this talisman to undo your last steps, reverting you through space to where you were ten seconds ago. ||

Running his fingers over the runic patterns carved on each item, Bayler Shrike began to think. This. He could work with this. A man without tools was little more than a pink ape, but a man with tools…

A human being with the right tools was an apex predator.