Chapter 25

As I like to say - “Size isn't everything.” The big guy put up almost no fight. It was probably all fat and no muscle. Would I get fat by eating this thing? Maybe I should diet and eat only the fast ones? Nope, *Chomp* into my stomach you go.

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/Absorbed:

-Multicellular organism - x1

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Hmm, I think I need to search for even bigger prey. With these small fries, it will take ages to collect enough for the upgrades. Though, the question remains - “How large of a target, should I go for?” It only takes a single mistake for everything to end.

I look around myself and judge the grey shadows moving through the water nearby. It’s really hard to tell the size from afar. I think my single eye is not giving me any depth perception. Need more of them or at least upgrade the already existing one. Well, that’s all in the future, for now, let’s just keep harvesting life.

I rush towards one of the countless shadows, absorbing an unlucky stray cell in the process. As always, right before the impact, my little fighter drones are already outside and ready to rumble. The fight goes similar to the last one until my target decides to take a dive.

“Oh, no you don’t! You became my food from the moment I laid my eyes on you.”

I keep up the chase, knowing that the wounded animal, can’t outrun this vessel. My vision dims from the speed of my chase…

“No, that’s not right!”

I stop, my prey forgot as I take in my surroundings. Darkness covers most of my vision. Only upwards, can I see daylight shining.

The next few minutes are gone from my memory, and as my mind relaxes, I find myself floating at the surface. My mind wanders, forgotten memories of my childhood flashing by, as I become aware of how silly I must have been right now. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that I somehow regressed to worse than childlike fear of the dark.

I hear snickering as Kevin asks me if I would need a helping hand to visit the bathroom. This time, however, I have nothing witty to say back. Realising my abnormal state, he stops laughing and a worried tone is now heard in his voice. It’s joined by a female one, but for now, I ignore the questions and reassurances and just float while looking at the bright sky.

What is wrong with me?

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I keep floating for what feels like hours. Occasionally, I absorb a random cell and fight back anything larger that decides to snack on me. Still, my thoughts are hollow and my mind sluggish. It takes spotting a larger predator to finally shake me out of this stupor, and after escaping its grasp, I finally dare to do the thing I’ve been avoiding - I look down.

Through the greyness of my vision, I see rays of light - shimmering with intensity as they flow downwards. Yet for all their glory, they are soon consumed by the dark expanse. I can’t see the bottom. I don’t know why that fact scares me so much. I’ve been blindly swimming here for months. Going up and down, as the night turned into the day and the energy production picked up. Never noticing, never caring. Yet, here we are, suddenly all too aware of the possible dangers that might lurk down there.

No. No, that’s not right. It’s not the fear of the unknown that made me run for the light. It’s the fear of going back to my old shell. The fear of returning to that crippled state. Unable to feel, unable to see. All alone in the darkness with only my mind keeping me company.

I turn back - towards the light. I’d like to think I’m a stronger person than this. But as with every problem in my life, I push this one away. Safely cataloguing it as something to deal with in the future.

Humming a light melody, I turn towards the next grey shadow. Violence never solved anything, but then again, have you ever used enough of it?

-Three days later-

I near the target and my vesicles circle around it. It’s still blissfully unaware of the destruction that awaits it and keeps swimming while I match its pace. Without further warning, my swarm goes to work. In just seconds, dismantling it into smaller pieces that I absorb.

This is the reward of my unrelenting hunting expedition for the past few days. While I didn’t get any cool, new upgrades, I managed to amass large quantities of biomass. Which, while storing some for rainy days, went to fattening up my body. I raised the total cell module count to way over 2000, and, as an upside, it got incredibly easy to hunt smaller organisms. Every module acted as an unspecified standard cell that included factories for attacker production. While the attackers themselves didn’t grow stronger, the sheer amount of them made short work of anything that was under my size.

Speaking of size. As I grew, so did my targets. I worked out a system, where my enemies were always no more than twice my size. Though more frequently than not, I tend to not go that far. If they are too large, they get a chance to escape, and if they head down while doing so… Well, suffice to say that I made sure to go for the ones that couldn’t survive my initial attack.

There was something ‘zen’ about all this hunting. Now that I could see, it was much more fun. Then again, I always did like to do things, rather than wait for them to happen. Sometimes, I still can’t believe how well I handled the “dark” period of this life. Most people would have gone insane. At least, I only invented 320 new ways of singing “Macarena”. It’s fortunate that the human mind can’t store all that ‘useful’ information and right now I only remember 65 of them. At this point, I should count as a historical song archive. So if any desperate art/history/music students want to save this little old me. My coordinates are - ‘Fuck-knows-where-a-town, at the bottom of piss-puddle-street’.

Alright, that reminds me, I wanted to upgrade some stuff. Probably because of the larger prey, I got better loot. The biomass increase was self-explanatory, but last leviathan class organism I killed, dropped another crystalline molecule. I was on my way upgrading when the previous asshat bumped into me. Well, he learned the price of that the hard way.

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-Purchased ‘Upgraded energy storage’

/Notice:

-Player may choose from the following upgrades:

$Increased capacity

$Power generation

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Woah, I get to choose? That’s so unlike you, system. Where’s the catch?

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/Notice:

-Warning, choice required. If nothing selected in 30 seconds. The upgrade materials will be lost.

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Ah, there it is - the system I know and hate. I knew you had it in you.

While increased capacity sounds good, there is no way I’m skipping my chance of being able to use force lightning. There was never a question of whether I was a Jedi or a Sith. One has to stick by strict rules and the other can shoot lightning out of their fingers. No comparison, Sith wins hands down.

I’m obviously only guessing the use. For all I know, it could turn me into a car engine.

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-Selected ‘Electricity generation’

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Somewhere, in the middle of my body, something shifts. There a feeling of emptiness, and a spike of pain when the nerve cords connect to the new organ. I can feel something building up inside me. A pressure rising at a steady pace.

“Okay, how do we do this?”

I try to channel the built-up energy towards my sides, but nothing happens. I search for one of the nearby grey targets and ram it. Nothing happens.

As I consume the leftover parts while thinking of how to channel this power, whatever it is passes the critical point.

*Zap* - “Ouch! Fuck, motherfu...”

My whole body convulses from pain. For a moment, even my vision fades and I start to panic, but soon it’s restored.

“What the fuck just happened?”

I check for damages and find my innards partly liquefied. Okay, I make it sound worse than it is, but it seems the energy pulse fried some of my cells. I quickly send a wave of biomass towards the most damaged spot and wait as the cells start to repair themselves. It’s clear that something went terribly wrong. Whether it was the way I specified the target or something else entirely, I couldn’t tell.

Well, whatever it was, it also fried the system that generated it. For now, there is no more building pressure. Still, I will have to find out how to deal with this sooner or later. Crap. What if I’m becoming that terrorist Pokémon? I don’t want to be a suicide bomber.

-7 Seasons of Game of Thrones later-

Nothing really changed in my daily schedule, other than the constant stinging pain. Thankfully, I was large enough for it to not disable me completely and could keep up my hunting expeditions. It took some time to fix all the damage, but when it was done, I was less than happy as I still hadn't figured out what went wrong the first time. The power organ remained offline all through the repair process, so I couldn’t experiment. Currently, the last repairs are being made, and I go through all the hypothesis I came up with on how to manage this power.

As soon as the last remains of damage are fixed, the previous feeling of pressure building up inside me comes back. I quickly look for another enemy and have my drones encircle it and make sure it remains stationary by cutting through anything outside its shell. I go close and personal, and as I purposely chose a smaller target, its attempts at injuring me and fighting back are laughable. Steering myself to touch the thing, I will whatever energy that is building inside me towards the target. I picture inside myself a path. A wire that leads towards the outside and connects me with the grey creature’s shell. Here it comes.

*Zap* - “Bloody, fucking hell!”

Suffice to say, it didn’t work. My body was fried again.