“Yes, yes…” the storyteller said as she recalled the place where she should have been, narrative-wise. “Let’s start off there, shall we? Our Mother and Ruler, Lyrhea had just escaped from that dead end and was bolting through the forest on the legs she used to have. She was still in great danger, though, and as such, she-….”

…

After getting as far away as she could from those who were trying to hunt her down, Lyrhea found herself deeply lost. Though to be fair, she had no idea where she had been all of the previous times, but she was now even more lost than she had been.

“Damn it.” she hissed. “Why the hell are they hunting me? What did I do to them?”

She sat down and let her body wipe away the exhaustion she was feeling, and her natural healing factor did just that. However, as a result, she now felt absurdly hungry.

“Fuck.” she cursed as her stomach growled audibly. “Anything nearby worth eating?”

She looked around and found a few mushrooms. Given her now extreme hunger, she felt that she had no choice but to roll the dice. Her ‘favored food’ might have been live, fresh meat’ but she could still eat other things, right?

“No choice but to try.”

She picked the mushrooms and wolfed them down, and much to her shock and delight, they were non-toxic and actually made her feel somewhat satiated. It didn’t fill her the same way those baby rats had, but it was enough to stave off starvation.

With that issue dealt with, Lyrhea decided it was finally time to try her hand out at hunting. She would need to be careful, though, as her recent experience had shown her that too much effort in too short of a timeframe would leave her starving and weak, and there was no way that any foe she would be facing would not exploit the hell out of that.

Still, she didn’t exactly know how to hunt, let alone how to fight. She had let her instincts guide her in that fight against the rodent of unusual size, but she was pretty sure that was not something that she would be dealing with anytime soon. That fight may well have been ‘Easy Mode’ for all she knew, and if it was, then she was in danger.

She could still count on her healing factor, and she intended to make full use of it to try and find her own path to martial victory. After all, what could possibly go wrong when she could seemingly heal from nearly any wound given enough time?

Turns out things could go very badly, but she would learn that in due time.

…

She had spotted her first mark, and it had spotted her in return. She had foolishly revealed herself too soon, and now the cross between a lemur and a dog was looking her dead in the eyes.

She lowered her posture and rushed forward, hoping to use speed to deal a quick and decisive strike and end things before any other factors entered play. The lemur-dog was faster, though, and Lyrhea got a fist to the face and a slap by a heavier-than-expected tail that sent her rolling across the ground.

Clutching her side, she spat out blood and wheezed in pain. That single strike had apparently fractured a rib or two and was now at the critter’s mercy. For whatever reason, though, the animal merely gave her a tilted glare before darting away.

Lyrhea lay on the ground on her back as her healing factor kicked in and slowly knitted bone and meat back together as if they were never damaged, and after a few minutes, she was able to get to her feet and limp away while still in extreme pain. She ripped another berry from the nearby bushes and swallowed it, helping keep her from using too much of her already stored reserves from depleting and leaving her famished again.

This had been the fifth time, and she had already had to endure at least three whole days of this bullshit. Thankfully edible plants were everywhere, and that helped her fight back against her new biology’s Achilles Heel.

Every time she pushed herself she would burn through the food that she had eaten prior with the speed and efficiency of someone trying to make a long-lasting bonfire out of dried leaves and lighter fluid, and while those bursts did give her the power and speed she needed, without control and without the ability or competence to ambush her foe, she was essentially unable to play the long game while her foes almost never had that issue.

After limping for a while, Lyrhea was able to take a more upright posture as she began to feel better. She constantly snarfed more food as she moved, though, using her seemingly bottomless stomach and ability to swallow anything that could fit into her mouth after she partially unhinged her jaw as a way to build up reserves that could in turn be used to passively speed up her healing.

She eventually made it back to her base camp, which was sequestered inside a small cave. She never got to go inside, though, as before she did her senses began to scream at her to run and hide.

Before she could figure out why she was being overcome with such an urge, the darkness inside the cave gave way as a hulking monstrosity emerged from it and began to slowly and menacingly approach Lyrhea, who was locked in place out of fear. The creature was a true chimera, a mash-up between a gorilla, a tyrannosaurus rex, a goat, and a water buffalo, and its size matched its combination of bodily forms.

How the damn thing had managed to fit a nearly van-sized body inside such a small cave was anyone’s guess, and how it had managed to avoid setting of Lyrhea’s instinctual passive threat detection was equally unknown, but the fact remained that it was there, and based on its teeth it was a carnivore. Lyrhea could literally do nothing but gaze up in horror as the monster drew nearer, opened its maw wide, and leaned in to eat her.

She was saved by an unlikely ally, though. Although, to be clear, calling them an ally would be a stretch of absurd lengths. A battlecry of “Glory to the People!” and the thumping of a drum diverted the monster’s attention from Lyrhea and over to a fool of an Asian pounding away at a drum roughly 1/3rd his own mass while singing a patriotic song from the People’s Republic of China.

This was enough to knock Lyrhea out of her stunned state, and she began to slowly back away. The monster caught notice of this, though, and shot her a glare that almost froze her again.

Almost, but not quite, as instead all it did was turn the original ‘freeze’ response into a ‘flight’ response, and she bolted from the area like a bat out of hell, leaving the citizen of China to continue banging on his drum. She didn’t bother to care what his fate was or why he had done that, but in the end, she supposed it didn’t matter, as she was just glad to be running and not being digested.