*Lucas Jaeger*

Biology is not a pretty science.

Oh sure, when you sell it to kids it is all pictures of pretty flowers and cute kittens and maybe some majestic eagles, but the actual reality of the science is a lot more shitty. Sometimes quite literally, though dirt and blood were more common and in this case, the mixture of the two.

The specimens were about as excellent as Lucas could expect, killed by single shots through the eye by some excellent archer. Though admittedly he would need additional specimens killed in other ways so that he could examine the brain structure. Half a dozen specimens, from four distinct species, were hanging upside down in a tent having their blood drained.

Their arrival had been… Interesting, Lucas supposed. It seemed every soldier who hadn’t been on duty was there to cheer for his arrival, overjoyed that the ‘Hero’ was on the front line. Lucas had been able to skip most of the introductions- by unashamedly pushing them onto Terrasin and Versi- and had gotten Julian to help him get straight to work. Which in this case means find someone to get him bodies and then wait for them to get him bodies.

It did give him a chance to have a tour of the camp though, and Lucas thought the word ‘camp’ was quite stretched in this case. Military base would seem more accurate to Lucas, it was far more permanent than what springs to mind when one thinks of a camp. Sure, there were a lot of tents and temporary structures, but they had been dug in so long that buildings of stone and wood had popped up- along with watchtowers, fortifications, and even entertainments like pubs and what Lucas suspected were brothels.

He made a mental note to see about shutting those down- a place like this was at a conflux of risk factors that would make it easy for communicable diseases, including STDs, to spread. And because Francinea drew the soldiers from all over the kingdom, and even contributions from other kingdoms, an outbreak here would have a good chance of spreading throughout multiple kingdoms quite quickly. At least they didn’t have vehicular travel, with luck sick soldiers would die before they made it home and spread their disease. Well, STDs were rarely immediately dangerous, so those were almost definitely spreading- but it was not as likely that there would be one massive plague that would wipe out humanity.

Lucas did not approach the front lines, but was able to view them from a watchtower relatively close- and it was a nightmare. The battle was not quite constant, or even really a battle how you would normally think of it, rather groups of demons would attack at seeming random and at seemingly random locations.

From his observations on the tower, Lucas could not see any discernable pattern to their movements- though he had to admit that made it feel more natural than not. If they were being commanded to do something, Lucas would expect more coordination- or at least gathering the disparate groups into waves to attack at once. However, none of that was evident as of yet, but he would have to spend much more time observing. More time than he had given the projects he had left unfinished behind him, but he had to play his part in the political side of things.

And he was quite excited to start cutting.

Less excited was the poor sap he had recruited- which is to say ordered to work for him with his new authority- to do drawings for Lucas has he cut it up. Lucas imagined that the soldier had wanted to be an artist before recruitment, and probably dreamed of leaving the army to pursue art. To instead twist that into drawings of organs and bones, it almost made Lucas laugh. He did not, more because he was worried about what that said about him mentally than anything else, but there it was.

With the blood drained and a few repurposed torture devices- this army did not treat deserters very kindly- Lucas was making his first incision.

“Now lets see what you are hiding under there,” Lucas started to open the chest cavity of the first subject.

Commonly, this was called a Demon Dog, or sometimes a Hellhound- but that name was used for a large variety of vaguely canine like creatures, and so was useless for gathering any information. Lacking the information to really start categorizing, he had the drawings and notes for this dissection labeled as ‘subject A1’ or this world’s equivalent designation of ‘A1’ anyway.

Personally, Lucas thought it looked more like a hammerhead shark with legs than a dog- but he kept that to himself, though as an aside he did vow to never step on a boat in this world. If these were the kind of things that lived on land, Lucas had no desire to find out what populated this world’s oceans. But he shook his head and returned to his observations.

The head as shaped like an obtuse triangle, with the obtuse angle being where the snout was- though unlike the hammerhead shark, the eyes were not placed at the ends of the skull but towards the center. The jaw was quite small, again relative to the head and a cursory examination before the dissection began revealed powerful neck muscles and powerful claws on the front legs- which themselves had quite a range of motion- that was more like a felid than a canine.

At a guess, Lucas would say that it likely hunted like a great cat- tending to leap onto its prey and attempt to bite through the spinal column or bite out a throat- but also engaged in territorial fights with its own kind, which resulted in the strange shape of its skull. He would have more information about that when he got around to the head.

The body was quite similar to a cat or dog, though the tail was noticeably thicker and more heavily muscled. All in all, quite a scary predator, but nothing that seemed too abnormal or unnatural.

As Lucas started the dissection, the first thing he noticed was the toughness of the creatures hide. Obviously, he wasn’t working with the best equipment- he had more or less stolen knives from a butcher- but the hide was tough enough to make cutting difficult. Lucas hadn’t made sawing motions in a dissection for over a decade, but making a clean cut was simply impossible.

As Lucas explored, he had drawings made of every step. The organs and structures in the body, then those organs and structures removed and by themselves from multiple angles, along with dictations of his own observations. Overall, there was very little odd about what he was looking at- well, aside from the discovery that the creature was oviparous and a hermaphrodite, and likely capable of parthenogenesis.

Opening up the stomach was unpleasant, as it always is, but revealed an omnivorous diet- and a tendency to eat the bones of its prey. This was not too odd, but the level of digestion that they had gone through even at that stage was quite impressive- implying a particularly powerful mix of gastric juices, probably sped along by chewing its food.

Another interesting discovery was that the ‘tail’ was actually a fused set of legs- like what you would see in a whale. That explained why it had a lesser range of motion than Lucas had expected, but honestly he had no idea what purpose the structure served. Even whales had kept their mostly vestigial pelvic bones for a reason, and for that matter, the forces that led to them developing tails as they did were not present in this case.

Finally, the most perplexing discovery was an organ he could not identify- but whatever it was it had required a lot of the creatures energy to function. The bundles of nerves and blood vessels were so dense that they were visible to the naked eye. Upon dissecting the organ itself Lucas had trouble figuring out what it was. He suspected it was an electroplaques- and the organ itself was similar to what you would find in an electric eel- but that was even more confusing, because he could not figure out what it was used for. Hell, even the location was odd- he had found it below the vestigial hip structure.

Not precisely unnatural, but quite odd.

After a few hours of work, Lucas took a short break- more for his now extremely pale assistant than himself- and returned to work on ‘subject B1,’ known as a Firgue Demon. He had originally wanted to do this one first, but it took time to assemble a bucket brigade and a large amount of water and sand- because Firgue Demons were known for spitting fire. Or rather, they spat a liquid and then lit it with a spark when they shut their mouths.

It had a far more interesting physiology too- looking like the result of crossing a human and a frog in a laboratory and then adding anything that would make it look like it came straight out of a nightmare. Well, more an ape and a frog- but it was hairless, unlike the course brown hair of A1. It had an extremely thin haunch and a very thick chest. It was a knuckle walker, like an ape, but Lucas doubted it could support itself with only its back legs. Likely, it could only use one of its hands at a time, requiring the other for support.

As dissection commenced, Lucas found plenty of things strange about the subject- but not when taken individually. Yes, the flame spitting adaptation was interesting, but many creatures can spit poison and this was not far different when Lucas examined it. The biggest difference was the size of the organs involved, and where that spark came from- but he viewed that as separate from the flame spitting and with good reason.

The problem was that it shared many of the same things as the first subject. Vestigial hip bone and a fused set of additional back legs for a total of six limbs, hermaphroditic with a good chance of being capable of parthenogenesis, and that same electrical organ, though located beneath the spine in the neck region this time. That organ provided the spark that ignited the liquid, but taking all of that together both these subjects had a recent- speaking on the scale of evolution, so recent could mean millions of years- common ancestor.

Sadly for his poor assistant, Lucas did not take a break before starting C1- which was going to be quite the project, because it was the same creature that had stabbed him when he had first arrived in this world. A six meter tall nightmare, the unholy combination of a shark and a praying mantis, C1 had the exact same features as the other two- internally anyway. C1 was extremely strange as it possessed both an exoskeleton and an endoskeleton, though the endoskeleton seemed somewhat vestigial. Also, it had cancer. In fact, Lucas was fairly sure it would have died soon even without the arrow- but more importantly it helped him put a few facts together. He did not really have enough information to say for certain, but Lucas knew what he was looking at.

These creatures had been designed in a lab.