As she finally finished mentally and emotionally processing what she had just done, Lyrhea noticed something that made her heart quicken, and her nerves send out alarm signals that were almost immediately suppressed by her new state of being. Her eyes were continuing to dart over to the remaining rat pups, and worse than that, she was starting to salivate.

“No.” she growled at herself. “No, no, no you don’t.”

She got up and tried to walk out, but the mewling squeaks from the rat pups stopped her in her tracks. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she was starting to want to eat them. As if losing her natural human state wasn’t enough, she was already starting to lose her mindset of being human as well.

Although to be fair, she realized that had been slowly happening even earlier than now, but at least mere moments after waking up she had not had such contempt towards humans and such a malign, predatory hunger. She had, when human, found veal to be disgusting. In her eyes back then, it was a waste of a perfectly good potential adult animal that could end up feeding many more people and was a wasteful excess.

Now, though, she found her mind almost begging her to indulge in a bit of weak, supple, newborn flesh. And not merely slaughtered and processed meat at that, but live meat that was not even carved from the bone.

And that was scaring her less and less as the seconds passed onwards. She hit herself several times to try and fight off the impulse, and she likely would have been able to if another giant rat, likely the father of the pups, had not scurried in from a hole in the wall, seen that one of its pups was missing and that the obvious culprit was there, and tried to attack her.

She dodged aside as the giant rat lunged at her and in that fluid motion embraced the urge to respond to the lunging rat’s bite with a bite of her own. The fur of the creature was oily and matted, but Lyrhea was now acting purely on instinct and only felt disgust after she had already delivered a dose of venom into the giant rat’s body.

The oversized rodent screeched and wrenched its body out of her jaws, and thankfully for Lyrhea she had already begun to release it from her mouth before the creature’s writhing managed to break or otherwise damage one or more of her teeth. The two combatants took distance from each other, and circled for a bit before the giant rat once again tried to leap at Lyrhea, only to stumble mid-leap and plow straight into the wall right next to her.

The rat tried to get up, and while it did it was having a very difficult time keeping itself upright. To Lyrhea’s amusement, the rat stumbled around like a man high off his tits on an absurd amount of alcohol for a while before slumping over and panting heavily.

The venom she had delivered would obviously not be nearly enough to kill the creature, but it was enough to knock it out of the fight, and while it had indeed been fighting to protect its family, Lyrhea could not care less. The new part of her existence looked down on the giant rat with a massive amount of baleful contempt and malice, and then it began to drive her to engage in an act of utter heartless pettiness and cruelty.

Lyrhea walked over to the remaining mewling rat pups and locked eyes with their father. Her mouth twisted into a smile as she picked one up and downed it whole and alive, pausing only for dramatic effect and to further twist the knife before downing another, and another, and another, until none were left.

As she finished, the newer side to her lost control, and the remnants of her humanity surged to the surface and filled her with a mix of violent and contradictory emotions. She then looked back at the downed father rat and heard its soft but furious noises and realized that she had gone much too far.

There was only one way to make sure this would not come back to bite her, and with that in mind, she moved down to the ground and began to use her hands to choke the life out of the giant rat. The venom in its body helped the process along, and soon the only noises in the bathroom were those of Lyrhea’s own making.

After keeping her hand tight around the giant rat’s neck for a few minutes longer, Lyrhea eventually stopped and ended up sitting on the floor, her eyes focused on the giant rat’s corpse and her senses utterly heedless to the incoming attack. She was only driven out of her stupor when a bullet slammed into her face and ended up stinging like a paintball.

“Argh! Fuck!” she hissed as her hands moved to the place where the bullet had landed. The .45 Magnum bullet had not broken her skin, nor had it done much damage at all. Instead, all it had done was sting like the dickens, as well as piss her off. “Who the fuck did that?!”

She got her answer when she instinctively dodged to the side as a sledgehammer came down on the place where she once was, and her eyes found the four humans had returned, most likely because they wanted to claim the body of their fallen comrade.

“Kill the monster!” shouted one of them.

Another swing from another melee tool was dodged and Lyrhea scampered out from the dead-end she had put herself in and out of the building, all the while rubbing the place where an impact that should have been lethal had struck home.

As she ran, she found herself wondering how a gun designed to kill with a headshot like she had endured was unable to even pierce her skin, as well as why the four people that were currently on her heels were so interested in killing her rather than talking to her. These, of course, would be questions for later, and she still needed to get a weapon with more reach than her fingernails and her teeth.

If she could get enough distance, then maybe she could finish the Tutorial or whatever it was and hopefully get some answers as to why things were the way that they were, including why she was no longer human and why she was being hunted.

So she ran again, and hoped that she could buy more time to figure out her place in the world.