In the end, they decided to stay in the building, at least for a day’s rest. They were all tired, to varying degrees.

But it wasn't that long ago that its pack was woken up by 'Ghoul', followed by a ritual and a fight, all exhausting in their own ways, so its humans were quite content to play with their catch, alternating from one search it didn’t understand or care about to another, unearthing things from the floor, the walls, and from just plain old chests strewn about the place.

Then play fighting amongst themselves and their captures.

As for itself, after an hour or two of vigorously chewing through a dozen corpses while ‘Emreeil’ drained their blood by sitting there and calmly sipping at the floating stream, a thing it was quite annoyed about, it was content and eager to get to work with its changes, so it had walked up to the second half-floor of the building, and flopped down to rest while the small green human climbed up to the roof to act as overwatch.

The thing it had eaten was apparently called a ‘Lungburn fish’.

Weird, weird names, as usual.

The fish had a small mountain’s worth of potentially useful things the wolf could add to its arsenal, but the problem was that it couldn’t quite understand a whole lot of its biology. It could just blindly copy it, but if it wanted to modify it in depth and experiment, it would probably be best to catch a few more, once it found those streams again.

What it did understand and see however, was both incredible and daunting.

The process of generating and discharging electricity was about as complex as a human brain. Six different types of tissues, dozens of different proteins and enzymes and that again in chemical reactions, three different organs producing three different substances which were all necessary, and that wasn’t to mention the genius way the fish could breathe underwater, or use electroreceptors and mechanoreceptors to be able to navigate around predator and prey underwater.

It didn’t quite understand the concept or put a word to the emotion, but seeing all of its prey’s biology felt awe-inspiring in a way it couldn’t quite remember feeling before.

While true understanding eluded it, copying and modifying things a bit was still entirely possible.

It looked at its body’s insides, and frowned.

There wasn’t much room to work with.

So the first thing it did was make room.

Its liver was the first to go.

The liver was a fairly useful organ, but it was large, bulky, and without the wolf ever having to worry about poisons that wouldn’t at the very least explode when meeting open air, and its adaptive mana-cells working with its immune system to give it immunity to poisons the more it was exposed to them, as well as not having any need for bile and stomach acids, it just wasn’t needed.

It was the largest solid organ in its body as well.

It removed toxins from the body's blood supply, maintained healthy blood sugar levels, regulated blood clotting, and performs something like a dozen other vital but small functions. It was the only reason it hadn't removed it up until now, but more than half those functions were redundant or replaceable.

The essence drain from having those few useful functions regulated by nothing but [Devourer] was also not much more than simply having to fuel the organ itself, so it didn't really lose much.

After removing the organ for room, it moved the teeth it had pocketed within its insides into the bottom of that empty space.

Progress on having its [Devourer] infused teeth turned to blades or armor plates was coming along nicely, but slowly. Each had elongated to about two inches of awkwardly-shaped murder.

It would have time before it would have to move them again, with this glacial growth.

It removed two of the flamethrower systems it had attached to its tails, and inspected the new room it had. Combined with its still-growing body and some of the free space it already had, it wasn’t an insignificant little pocket.

It would be enough.

Now to think about what it could do with the fish’s biology…

A mental catalog of the fish’s abilities was made, and the wolf pondered what it wanted the most and how it could fit it into itself.

The fish had a lot of things, all useful.

To start with, it had nerves made of some kind of biological metal that was more like rubber, but with the conductivity of iron.

It would not have sounded like much if the wolf didn’t know better.

There was always a delay between thought, reaction, and action. The electrical signals had to traverse the complex system of nerves and that took time.

It didn’t have numbers, but it was a not insignificant amount of time that was lost, purely because the travel time for commands to go from its brain to its body and vice versa was so inefficient. Nerves were not great at moving electric signals.

The exact mechanics of electricity far eluded it, but it could understand that the fizzy energy would move a lot easier through some materials than some others.

The fish’s nerves were made to be carriers for this energy. They would send information a dozen times faster than normal ones, as close to instantaneous as one could reasonably get to.

Normally, this would also open up the issue of the nerves getting a light, outside shock, and having their user spasm uncontrollably.

The fish’s immunity to electricity was, thankfully, entirely biological. It came from a supercomplex type of cell that was functionally immune to electricity and came in two forms, the dense hardened sleeve that was tightly wrapped around the nerves to ignore outside influence, and the thin, smaller bundles that were produced by one of its organs and then spread out throughout its bloodstream to latch onto blood cells, growing over them like an insulative shield.

Theoretically, some muscle fibers would still spasm when electricity was directly applied to them by outside forces, and it might feel a faint tingle if some electrified spike hit an artery or something, but it wouldn’t travel at all beyond the exact fibers getting the shock.

So not complete immunity, but close enough for the difference to not matter.

It tried to look into these insulative cells, but their complexity was just… too much, and it felt like there were small chunks of information just missing. Its auxiliary brains helped it not get a headache just from looking into them, but it just couldn’t quite understand it without zoning out.

It was like trying to decipher a spiraling maze with small, but not insignificant sections blacked out, except the maze was layered.

It could see enough to understand that it wouldn’t likely poison itself by incorporating these cells into itself, however, so it set [Devourer] to the task of replacing all of its nerve systems with these metal ones, all the way up to the base of its brain.

The second interesting part of its prey’s biology was the ability to expel electricity.

Of the three main, unnamed organs associated with its electrical nature, the first was dedicated to making the protective cells that would enter the bloodstream, and was independent.

The second and third organ were both dedicated to making two different specific unique cocktails, attached together like lungs along its back. The fish would then just squeeze some muscles along the insides of the lung-like organs, which would release the different cocktails into a central chamber to mix with some mild contractions.

This is where the chain reaction from the two substances meeting would create some form of liquid lightning, like electrically supercharged plasma.

Normally, this should flash-cook the little creature, but the organs’ innards were lined with another separate insulative gel that would harden and puff up when faced with heat, and trap all the heat inside.

All along this chamber, nerves were interspersed from top to bottom, leading out of the branch-like stalks coming out of the lower half of the fish’s back, surrounded by muscle and fat, to siphon the electricity out into the waters.

Likely to stun aquatic prey, considering that water was pretty good at transferring electricity, or so it could remember from dipping its paws into electrified puddles.

Strictly speaking, it had no reason to add this part to itself. Electricity was an interesting energy and form of attack to consider, but making it work in open air would be far, far more difficult than in water.

That was unless it considered a simpler method of attack, like launching the plasma out as a liquid. It wasn’t sure what would happen if it met open air, but it was curious enough to find out.

The problem was how the entire structure of the organ made it impossible to launch out of a pouch or using a flamethrower system, not without burning a giant hole in its body every time it used it.

Instead, it decided to try something more and less inventive.

In the upper part of the free space left behind by its liver, well-hidden behind its ribs, it formed an upsized version of the pair of lungs, and ran some tight, wire-like bundles of nerves down the inside of its wrist, until it had a small smattering of needle-like protrusions coming out of its wolfen palms.

If it could get its hands on something, it should theoretically have one more way to murder it.

It briefly considered how painful it would be to have exposed nerves on its palms, then realized that it wouldn’t feel any of them because they had no receptiveness.

From simple guesswork, it could assume that it would end up feeling a whole lot more numb than before when its changes were done.

Another pause had it considering the fact that without the water around the nerves to cool them down, they would… probably liquify from the heat? Electricity was warm.

And while the film of insulative cells around the nerves would keep them from losing their shape or capabilities, and hopefully from burning through into its flesh, if they were exposed to open air to transfer the electricity, the wolf would surely end up with melted nerves bleeding out of its palms after one or two shocks.

Unless the metal was somehow different, which was entirely possible because the wolf simply didn’t know what its properties were. It was treating it like a rubbery sort of iron, for the moment.

Still, even if it had melted neural roots on its palms, it was nothing even a few seconds of work wouldn’t fix during its sleep, but not great if it had to go without sleeping for an extended period of time.

There was some worry of a shock penetrating the insulative layer and zapping its entire nervous system, but the fish’s biology had seemed to account for that as well with multiple stopgap measures in the form of insulative cell bundles sitting near a lot of the roots of the fish’s body, ready to form barricades against a returning force that would exceed some kind of capacity.

If it cared to be honest with itself, it had no idea how that worked, or if it did work at all, but it would see how it worked out. This was more of an experiment than anything, to see how this would be like.

Moving on, it added the smaller of the three organs that would flood its organs with insulation cells, low in its gut, using the freed up space from the flamethrowers it removed.

It moved onto the other things the fish had to offer.

After a brief consideration of gills, it discarded the idea as unnecessary and space-taking, and turned to a final alteration it wished to make.

It wanted to see what it could do with biological metal.

The mere notion was so bizarre that it was baffling.

It hadn’t tried to eat metal yet, nor form it, because not only did it have no idea how, and neither did [Devourer], it just didn’t register as a biological material.

Yet, the fish had it.

How did it form?

Best idea it could come up with was a complex mess of iron bacteria in the water, likely from running through a seemingly endless nest utterly covered in it, which the fish somehow consumed, absorbed, or had some kind symbiotic relationship with in the past, interacting with various chemical reactions to turn into actual iron as it grew older, and somehow replace its nerves with that.

It just didn’t know how.

But the important thing was that the metal registered as biological in [Devourer], so despite its absurd cost, it could make it now, even if it had no idea how it worked.

The problem was that it had no idea what to use it for.

It was too soft and yielding to be armor, too heavy as well, and its properties were not all that similar to actual metal. It didn’t hold its position, it wasn’t rigid, it wasn’t tough.

The wolf could condense it, massively, but it would likely just make it like rigid clay while being a few times heavier. There was no point.

Without any ideas forthcoming, it decided to confirm its changes, update its ‘template’ for regeneration purposes, and sleep away the…

Singular hour they would take to happen.

[Devourer] seemed to be speeding up constantly.

It ended up sleeping for six hours, and woke up feeling like it should have slept a dozen more, stumbling to its feet and stretching with a yawn.

Its brain slowly came up to speed, and it raised a vaguely humanoid arm, squinting at its palm.

It couldn’t actually see the nerves, even if it knew that it had covered its palm in them.

Clenching and unclenching a fist, it tilted its head.

The sensation was strange. It felt like half the feeling in its body, in its body’s insides, just vanished.

It could still feel pain, because its body’s tissues were still loaded with pain receptors, and the signals would still travel, better than ever now, but it was just… like it didn’t have insides.

It curled its elbow, twisted its spine, and felt like something was missing.

Very odd, but it could get used to it, especially with more much more responsive its body felt. It felt like when ‘Emreeil’ would give it a huge boost, body and mind becoming one single thing without intermediary messages to slow things down.

It glanced down at the floor, and after a brief moment of consideration, scratched out a small clump of metal.

One human arm held the nugget up for scrutiny, and its front arms snipped off the jagged edges with phasing claws, rounding it to something that would not tear at its throat as it went down.

A passing consideration to try and sculpt it into some shape or object rose, but it pushed it away.

With a hesitant stare, it opened its jaws, and tossed the nugget into its throat.

It swallowed, and waited.

After ten seconds it realized that it didn’t actually know if it had vanished into [Devourer] or not. It could use the Skill while awake now, but nothing popped up, and its stomach didn't feel any heavier. It could try to dive into its biology and check manually, but it preferred to not have a crippling headache immediately after waking up.

It left that curious interaction for the next time it slept.

It padded over to the edge as it unfurled its antennas, finding ‘Emreeil’ to be on guard duty now, lounging on the slanted roof, while ‘Katherine’ and ‘Scruffy’ were clanking away in little pots.

It tilted its head down, and stared with puzzlement as they slurped an oddly-colored liquid.

Oh. Eating.

They were eating.

It forgot they were actually still humans, mentally, for a moment. It had been half-expecting them to just be eating raw flesh like normal creatures.

It glanced at the corner, staring curiously at the single dried out husk of a corpse and the unconscious second captive, annoyed that it had missed a fight. Or a kill.

It really, really, really really wanted to kill something.

There was no real reason it could pinpoint, it just wanted to kill something. Additionally, it still felt hungry, even after eating twelve people, and if it wanted to make more of those braided plant strips for armor, it would have to find more essence.

After another moment of curiously watching its packmakes sipping at some watery soup over a makeshift flame, it raised its right hand, and curiously flexed that little bundle of muscle near where its liver used to be.

Instantly, searing heat bloomed in its chest, and its eyes widened in panic as it jerked its head down, twisting to stare at its ribcage.

The heat quickly retreated as something within shifted, likely the gel hardening, and the boiling heat quickly receded to a pleasant warmth, like a muted furnace in its chest.

There was an indigo glow behind its right-side bottom ribs, vaguely outlining the bones, likely the plasma glowing through the gel.

If it was actually plasma. It couldn’t honestly tell, or understand it. Since the organ was going to digest the liquid after it had expended all of its energy, it assumed that it… was?

It was times like this that made it wish it hadn’t removed the symbol in its skull, or at least that it hadn’t been some kind of mental control trigger so that the wolf could have kept it. It would have been quite content to have a library of knowledge occasionally tossing it information when it asked, if it hadn’t been for that.

It stared at the odd purple-blue glow, finding it oddly pretty.

The fact it glowed through gel, flesh, plant-armor plate, then its ribs and finally its fur, did not escape notice. It would likely burn out its retinas in open air if it was that bright.

It could feel the buzz, the nerves embedded in the gel and smeared across the entire organ somehow not liquefying from the intense heat.

Like twitching a muscle, it activated the nerves.

With a ridiculously loud buzzing, crackling, snarl sort of sound, arcs of blue light danced around its palms, and it stared at them in wide-eyed wonder for a moment before cutting them off, ignoring the cry of surprise from ‘Katherine’ below.

It sniffed, and smelled smoke.

It supported itself on its secondary arms as it lifted its left hand off the ground, and stared at the pockmarked slate of steel, burned and still glowing orange in some spots.

Sitting on its haunches, it pulled, but didn’t let the pressure release, slowly draining the liquid, tilting its head down to stare at the dimming orb of light in its chest.

It felt ‘Emreeil’ put her head through the roof hatch to stare, but ignored her.

Its ears flattened in irritation when it realized that it didn’t have fine enough control to draw energy only into one arm, deciding to rectify that as soon as possible, even if it meant only one arm could use its new trick.

Two weak shocks were not even close to being as useful as one big, strong one.

Finally, it released the buzzing trill it could feel in its arms, ignoring the oddly pleasant sensation of its hairs standing on end, and yipped in surprise when a white arc shot out of its palms with a thunderclap, its aftershocks dancing along the railing and the floor.

Sounds of surprise from 'Katherine' and 'Scruffy' reached its ears a moment later.

Its left paw slipped through said floor, and it hurriedly pulled it up through the molten hole it had made, staring wide eyed at it, tails rigid and ears straight in surprise.

The liquid in its chest cooled down with absurd speed, barely even warmer than the rest of its insides, and it felt the organ shift back into a less rigid state.

A prod at its mind, and after another moment of pleasantly surprised incredulity, it lowered its mental walls as ‘Emreeil’ hung upside down from the roof hatch like one of those weird squeaky flying things that hung around the spires by the burning river, baring her teeth at it.

Weird human.

The next prod took almost half a minute to arrive as ‘Katherine’ kept grumbling below, slurping at her little pot.

The slowness of communication was grating, but it endured because it had no other choice.

When ‘Emreeil’s’ message did arrive, it immediately disregarded it.

Why would it need a human sound to address itself? It was itself.

After it put that thought forward and experimentally began rolling and slashing at nothing to test how in tune and faster its body felt, ‘Emreeil’ sent a reply another half minute later.

It slowed, tilting its head.

It made sense, in a way. They had to address it somehow, and their whole communication and thought system worked on sounds. Unique sounds, but sounds all the same.

As it thought, ‘Emreeil’ experimentally poked the ladder, and after no shock met her, she slowly slithered down the ladder, closing the hatch behind her, ragged cloaks and ill-fitting coverings softly rustling as she moved down to its level.

“Hey Kat, time to have a chat?” ‘Emreeil’ asked over the railing.

“Okay.” ‘Katherine’ replied.

It sent back what it wanted to be called.

‘Emreeil’ turned to it, wide eyed, before bursting into another happy fit of yipping, stumbling past it.

It tilted its head.

What was so amusing or happiness-inducing about ‘the hungry wolf that will always hunt’?

‘Emreeil’ clicked her fingers as she drew close, likely to draw attention to her hands, still making odd snickering sounds, and after some pantomiming, it understood her intent, and followed her down the stairs.

Then it squeezed past her because something about following rubbed it the wrong way. It would lead.

‘Scruffy’ slid aside as it neared and hovered next to the fire, and ‘Emreeil’ walked past to sit by the waning little fire of clothes and broken boxes, patting the space next to her.

Not having anything else to do besides to kill the man in the corner, which could wait, it trotted up to the fire, and sat on its haunches, pushing the same unique sound for itself back at her with a questioning lilt.

It took a morose two minutes for her to reply, during which it decided to just curl up on the floor and watch the pretty fire.

Her reply was a bit odd.

Humans apparently liked to summarize their unique ‘name’ sounds into a single ‘word’, a small but continuous sound.

Which was true, as far as it could tell. ‘Scruffy’, ‘Katherine’, ‘Emreeil’.

Plenty of humans had called it a lot of things, all one word. ‘Mutt’, ‘fleabag’, ‘gutterscum’, even ‘doggie’ from some of the nicer ones.

So it began to ask her what those meant, trying to bring back muffled memories of gruff voices, distorted and hazy, and pushing them to her.

‘Mutt’ was apparently a dog with bad breeding.

Which… it could see why they might have made that assumption. It had been an inch away from death back then, for a while.

‘Fleabag’ was apparently a reference to having insects or ticks in its fur and a generally weak appearance.

Frankly, it liked that one.

Mostly because of how it reminded the wolf of where it had started, and where it was now. Every time someone would say it, it could remember where it had been, a bag of bones covered in parasitic insects, dying, and compare it to itself now, several dozen times heavier, bigger than any other dog it had seen so far, and able to slaughter humans by the dozens if it wanted to. An extra bit of push to grow even stronger, and a reminder of how pathetic it once had been.

In the middle of ‘Emreeil’ trying to figure out how to word the next human sound and translate it, it pushed back its chosen name-sound.

It felt both humans go still and turn to stare at it.

It cracked open an eye on its hip, examining the awed expressions on their faces.

“It- he wants to be called Fleabag.” ‘Katherine’ murmured, voice strange. “The wolf wants its name to be Fleabag.”

“I- I mean i-it’s quite- quite fuhahaah-!” ‘Emreeil’ burst out into uproarious, joyous yipping, collapsing on her back, and it rose back up on its haunches, jutting its chest out in pride with a low, wavering howl, trying to mimic the hiccup-sounding noise.

It didn’t succeed, but ‘Katherine’ started making the yipping sound too, a more subdued version, so they were both very happy with its chosen name as well.

Not that it cared, it would have chosen it even if they found it annoying, but it was an added benefit.

‘Fleabag’.

It had meaning and depth, and if the humans all understood the sound the same way, it was incredibly deceptive. They’d be surprised if they came to kill a fleabag and met the wolf, underprepared and entirely unsure of what it could do. If name sounds were a descriptor for someone, then its deception would be staggeringly effective. Easy pickings.

‘Emreeil’ extended a weird wing-arm around it, and retracted it, her hand curled around its side as she pulled it in, breaking its pose.

It mock-growled, and pounced.

It wanted to kill something right now, but pretending to do so would have to do, for a bit.

‘Emreeil’ rolled around the floor with it, her various appendages fighting to keep its jaws and tongue away from her face.

“Em, you’re going to ruin your clothes again.”

“You tr-ow! You try telling him to stop after laughing at him!” ‘Emreeil’ yelped back, and it redoubled its efforts, slithering around her grapples to wrap its arms around her neck and place its fangs on her skull, blunted, tails thwapping the floor.

‘Emreeil’ went limp with a huff.

It won.

It twisted around her again, before sprawling out on top of her, four arms widely limp on the floor beside them, content with its victory, yawning widely and ignoring her groan.

A lull came by as it settled on the mildly complaining human, until another message was pushed to its mind, almost a full ten minutes later as ‘Katherine’ washed out the metal bits she used to cook her food off to the side.

It was… complex.

The other two humans turned to look at it as they parsed through the same. Its eyes glazed over as it tried to decipher the messy bundle.

It was a mess of clarifications, requests and half-muddled explanations. In short, it made no sense. It couldn’t even tell if the random segments were connected to each other.

It sent back confusion, before deciding to ask its own questions, now that it finally, finally had the opportunity to.

Indecision kicked in as it sent the mental equivalent of a reprimanding growl through the bond with a shove for quiet, and the humans, thankfully, obeyed.

It remembered having hundreds of questions, with only more growing, but gradually, as it crawled through miles of tunnels and fought day after day to get even a peek of a better life, they just gradually faded, leaving behind a vaguely confused mess.

Five minutes passed before it asked the simplest and most important one.

In a succinct manner, it simply asked what was outside the nest, if there even was an outside, if it encompassed the whole world. Then it rolled that question along with a clarification about what the sky was, because from the vague ideas the rune in its skull had given it, it hadn't actually seen it yet.

‘Katherine’s’ head jerked up to stare at it, wide eyed, and ‘Emreeil’ did the same.

It turned its head and opened an eye on its hip to stare back at both, mildly confused.

When ‘Emreeil’s’ reply came back, it was laden with pity and sympathy that made its mood sour instantly, but that was quickly forgotten as images came in.

It got off of her, taking a step back and to the side, eyes unfocused, before it closed them entirely, to focus on the images.

The nest had an end and a defined size, which was monstrously huge but still quantifiable. Which was interesting and relieving, but the second question's answer moved the wolf far more.

The sky was…

Nonsensical.

Beautiful.

It had never seen something so bright in its entire life. It had never seen that much clear, endless blue. It was so uniform and perfect and smooth it couldn’t help but wonder what it might feel like to rub or lick. Would it feel as smooth as glass?

The fuzzy white banks of mist, clouds, were even more beautiful, the contrast and breaks in the blue somehow making it even more impressive.

It asked where the sky was, where it could find it, if it could touch it, because for a supposed void, the sky looked quite solid.

The muted feelings of pity and some kind of disbelieving realization attached to the following replies once again grew, grating all the same.

Those feelings did not compare to the reply it got from the two big humans, too drowned in another nonsensical explanation to process the mixture, images and concepts slowly, slowly rolling in.

‘Scruffy’ said she’d never seen the sky either, and it felt an even bigger sense of kinship with the odd, useless little human.

A hand landed on its head, and it sat on its haunches, allowing 'Emreeil' to pet its head as it lost itself in images it could hardly believe.

It asked where all the light came from, learned about the sun and the moon, about how both them and the sky they were in were both completely and utterly unreachable, meant to be admired from afar.

It asked how big the outside world was, only to learn that this human nest was little more than a small pebble within a nigh-infinite world.

It couldn’t even fathom or comprehend that size.

It asked why humans bared their teeth, why their body language made no sense, and found the rough gist of it explained, a backwards thought process with too much nuance for the wolf to ever be able to grasp or truly understand.

It learned the confusing action of ‘laughing’, the happy yipping its pack did. It learned of how humans laughed for a dozen different reasons, all dependent on tone, tiny expressions, and a myriad more confusing conditions that it decided were too much trouble to try and interpret.

Eventually, it sat back down and stared at the smoldering embers of the fire, the only faint light left behind, ‘Katherine’ laying on her side in a similar pose on the opposite end with ‘Emreeil’ curled up to its back for warmth.

And it continued asking, receiving endless answers to its endless questions, images and sensations.

It saw trees. It saw flowers and leaves and green grass. A dusty expanse of sand interspersed with mountains, sent from ‘Katherine’, tainted with resentment and pain.

It learned what years and hours and months and seasons were, things so irrelevant to itself but so interesting. It learned about music and why the humans listened to it. It learned what the sea was.

It took three hours for them to ask a simple question that made several dozen things click.

Did it know what it was?

Of course it did, and it said so.

Then they explained why its existence was apparently seen as a scourge upon the world itself by most if not all humans, how some kind of supposedly perfect human they called ‘The Oracle’ had declared that not a single wolf existed whose heart beat or whose body drew breath, how it was the first in almost a thousand years to be heard of.

‘Emreeil’ tried to use that as a springboard to explain why it should stop eating random humans and only target certain groups to avoid drawing more ire, and it half-listened, a bit stunned and struggling to comprehend that time frame.

Moreover, it was difficult to comprehend that besides these three humans, and ‘Ghoul’s’ pack, the entire world was an enemy to it, and it specifically.

It was difficult to not feel that urgency again, that urge to grow stronger and stronger, because it had once thought that maybe if it grew strong enough, it could live a nice, exciting, fulfilling life.

If things were how its pack had described it, that would never come until it was invincible and undeniable. The world would be its enemy, until either one or the other gave up.

And the one thing the wolf didn’t do, ever, was give up.

By the time ‘Emreeil’ had gotten to the question she initially wanted to ask, what its Skills and abilities were, it was too mentally exhausted to care to answer and so were they, having spent five hours in a constant back-and-forth with its pack, getting to know them by the taint and taste of their thoughts, their experiences.

Eventually, it had enough, and simply shoved back the notion of sleep to its pack, forcibly dragged ‘Katherine’ over to join the sleeping pile, then extricated itself and grabbed a hold of their male captive, dragging him out the back of the building as he stirred awake.

A snack to gnaw on while it kept a lookout.

They’d gotten their respite, their day of rest.

Tomorrow, they’d cross the bridge if it could still hold them, and keep descending.

As it snapped the slowly awakening human’s neck and pulped his neck in its jaws, using the tentacle in its back to drag the corpse along and mark a circle of blood around the building as it paced and ate, it lost itself in thought, occasionally tilting its head up to stare at the snaking fog.

It wondered how dangerous it would be to try and get to the surface of the human nest and see the sky.

It wondered how plausible it was that it might be able to clear the nest of humans entirely. How strong it might get from that.

Because despite what ‘Emreeil’ said, it didn’t believe it would be ignored so long as it just targeted the right groups of humans, not if what she said about how the wolf and it’s long-lost kin were seen was true.

It would just have to wait and see.

-

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