by J. J. Pavlov
And it's a really uncomfortable feeling.
There the wolf is again, or maybe it's another one of its species, I can't tell animals apart too well. It's eating a small furry animal it just hunted, and I can feel my insides churn at the sight of blood and guts. But for some reason, it's not nausea as one would expect, but rather pure and unadulterated hunger. My mind seems to go blank at the sensation, and my conscious thoughts feel jumbled.
I want to... no, I need to eat!
Noticing my approach, the wolf moves around to keep me within its line of sight. I won't fight you over that small thing since it won't satisfy me in my current state.
I'll have you instead!
Dissolving my appearance, I transform into the shape I had earlier this morning. My arms and legs are made of tentacles, so if I spread them out, they should become longer. It's really strange, I somehow know what I'm capable of, how to move all these individual appendages and use them to their full potential. These must be inborn instincts.
The wolf yelps at my sight, and I can see that it's terrified by my appearance. But that only seems to fuel my hunger further.
Unraveling my leg tentacles at blinding speed, they expand like a spring, and I lunge forward like a horizontal Jack in the Box. Taken by surprise, the wolf flinches and is unable to respond in time. I latch onto it with my whole body, like a squid grabbing onto a whale, making sure to seal its mouth so that it can't call out for its pack if it has one.
It thrashes around and slams me into the ground, but I don't even feel the impact because of my elastic body. As I cover its entire head, I begin to strangle it with my unexpectedly powerful tentacles. All the while, my mind is filled with delight at the thought that I'm taking a life to feed myself.
But for some reason, it doesn't feel wrong.
Finally, the beast stops moving and only twitches a few times, before it slackens completely. Just to be sure, I stay attached for a little longer, until I'm sure that it's dead. Then I let go and peer down on the lifeless body on the ground before me, a single thought overwhelming my mind.
Eat.
It's already been around two hours since I've come to this world, so if this is a dream, it's quite the long one. Still, within this time, I had a man inside me, and now I'm taking in a beast.
My body seems to be significantly bigger on the inside, so I have no problem taking my prey in, even though it's more than five times my mass. A Crawling Chaos' body seems to defy the laws of physics since, at the end of it all, nothing shows on the outside.
Also, it would appear that I'm actually quite strong. If I had been a normal human, this wolf would have mauled me to death, and I wouldn't even have been able to put up a fight. But now, anything that I can take inside me can serve as food.
Now that the immediate danger of starving to death has been averted, it slowly dawns on me what just happened. I just killed a living creature in a very gruesome way, and I did it ruthlessly without questioning my actions at all. Even the excuse of starvation doesn't explain how I could do what I just did. Is that my true nature? Am I a natural-born killer?
But this is a dream, so I shouldn't think about it too much.
Let's gather some information about this place and myself. Even if I could wake up at any moment, I should try to enjoy the ride for as long as it goes on. This is an adventure after all.
First things first, I need to find out where I've been transported to. It's not like I know any landmarks other than what I saw from inside the palace, but I guess you could say that the barren landscape with the jutting jagged rock formations would indicate proximity to the castle. In other words, I need to get my bearings first and see how extensive this forest is.
Therefore, I climb the tallest tree I can find. Halfway up I realize that using my tentacles would be faster than doing it in my human form. But it's strange how quickly it naturally comes to me that I can utilize a method I wouldn't even have dreamt of using before.
Well, I guess now I am dreaming of it.
Same for eating by directly taking things into my body rather than through my mouth. Now that I've experienced it, I can't help but think that it's much more efficient. If only I could do this in reality.
When I reach the top of the tree, all I can see is a sea of dark green leaves, surrounded by mountains on all sides. This place is most likely a valley inside a mountain range. Maou-mama, why did you send me somewhere this far away without even a return transportation circle for when you come to pick me up? Don't tell me she just abandoned me here? Did I do something to anger her?
I snap my head around and stare into the distance, where a huge cumulonimbus cloud moves into view between two mountains. It catches my eyes because it's faster than feels natural for a giant cloud like that.
Then it stops.
Now it begins moving back to where it came from, against the direction of the wind, as if it has a mind of its own. That's no cloud...
And if those mountains are as tall as I think they are, that thing must be as tall as Mount Fuji. So that's a living being? That's scary! Now I know which direction I will not be going in.
Or actually, this is a dream, so why don't I go and check it out? I'm sure that's the most fun way to spend an adventurous dream. Yep, I'll laugh danger in the face and rush headlong towards it.
When I descend the tree, I find myself surrounded by a whole pack of the wolf-like creature I ate earlier. There are at least a dozen of them, staring at me with their piercing yellow eyes. A low rumbling growl comes at me from all sides, and they begin to tighten the circle slowly.
I'm sorry for laughing you in the face, danger!
Forgive me for killing and eating your friend in such a gruesome way, too! But he attacked me, so I had no choice!
The one closest to me lunges forward, and I use a tentacle to pull myself back up the tree. The wolf-like beast isn't so stupid as to hit the trunk, and stops just short of it, bearing its teeth at me from below.
I think for now I'm safe since I'm sure that wolves can't climb on trees with their claws. But normal wolves also don't have spines growing out of their backs or possess acid saliva.
Now is the time to explore how my body works. My teeth are as hard as the real deal, even though my actual form is so soft and malleable. In other words, I should be able to create claws or even blades out of teeth or bones. Kind of like a certain alien race that takes over a human body through their heads and can grow all kinds of appendages with blades and spikes.
When I try to visualize changing my hand into a curved blade, I feel my actual hand dissolving and morphing into a new shape. It comes out pretty well, and it took only a few seconds. While it doesn't look too sharp, I should be able to refine it more through training my visualization skills.
Now I understand my mother's plan in throwing me out into the wilderness. It's for me to learn through experiencing dangerous situations that force me to think of ways to utilize this body's abilities. Then again, would somebody without the knowledge of all kinds of games and movies have been able to do the same as I just did?
I refine the blade as best as I can by visualizing an actual knife, before testing it by slashing a nearby branch. My blade hand makes a clean cut, and the branch drops down to the wolf-beasts below, which hop back in surprise, before growling up to me again. With this, I can fight them.
Still, I don't want to jump down and face these numbers straight on, since my body isn't back to its full size, even after having eaten an entire wolf earlier. It seems that a Crawling Chaos has a pretty dense body, which requires more mass than one would think when looking at it from the outside.
I can extend my arm like a whip, by turning it into one long tentacle. This way, it's both flexible and prehensile, and I can exert much better control over my swing. And my attacks should be pretty powerful since I noticed that my tentacles do seem to have quite the strength in them despite not looking like it.
All I have to make sure of now is that I don't fall off
my branch like a moron. That wouldn't even be funny as a gag if I were to swing and miss, and then also fall. Turning my lower body into a mass of tentacles like I did when I attacked the first wolf-like beast, I grab onto the trunk of the tree and anchor myself in place. With this precaution out of the way, I finally turn my attention to the enemies below, which have started to circle the tree.
I snap my whip arm down towards one of them. It tries to dodge, but isn't able to avoid it completely and receives a deep gash in its flank. Whining from the pain, it jumps back and tries to lick its wound. The others from its pack witnessed it and immediately take some distance, before looking up at me with their teeth bared in impotent anger.
A brave one runs forward, jumps up and tries to increase its reach by bouncing off the tree. I'm too high up, so it drops back down without having even come close. Swinging my arm just before it lands, I make sure it can't dodge at all. The bone blade cut off one of its front legs, causing it to howl in pain and scramble to get away from me.
This is going really well!
Without any warning, all the wolves seem to enter a frenzy, as they leap forward and bite at the tree trunk.
Have they gone crazy at their impotence?
No wait, they have acid saliva!
Large sizzling holes open up in the tree where they bite into the bark, and the support is beginning to shrink. With the weight above the trunk, it'll break and topple soon.
I'm sorry I got ahead of myself again!
Now that it's come to this, I can only try and quickly finish them off before the tree falls over. Swinging my arm all over the place, I cut deep wounds into several of the wolves' bodies. Those that are hit especially hard quickly take their distance, but the others endure it to finish their work.
Snapping sounds emerge from the trunk, and the world tilts before my eyes as the tree slowly bends and falls. Before I get entangled in the branches, I jump off. I land right on the back of the wolf-beast whose leg I cut off. It yelps in surprise and fear, but can't shake me off.
Wrapping my tentacle legs around it, I begin to pull it inside my body. With this, I gain some extra mass for the battle.
At the same time as the tree hits the ground, the unfortunate creature is completely absorbed. Several of the remaining ones are wounded, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm outnumbered. And without hesitation, they all lunge at me with their fangs bared, ready to bite down on me and dissolve me with their acid saliva.
They run into a wall of spikes.
I changed the surface of my skin into sharp spikes made of bone and extended them outwards at an explosive rate. All the beasts impale themselves on me due to their speed. Let alone affecting me with their acid saliva, their mouths can't even reach my main body as they twitch in their death throes.
When I retract the spikes and change back into my human appearance, a circle of carcasses has formed around me. I've seen something similar with a slime-like creature in a game I played a while ago, although it only used that to attack the player during its turn rather than as a defensive tool.
I'm sure this is where I would have leveled up if this was a game-based setting. But in reality, resourcefulness beats raw parameters. Or I guess in a realistic-feeling dream in this case. As seen with these beasts, I could defeat them with very simple yet effective methods. If the attacks with my transformed blade had been based on stats, surely I wouldn't even have penetrated their skin. And the spikes would most likely have broken from the impact of their bodies, rather than impale them.
In either case, I don't want to be known as someone who wastes lives and food, even in my dreams. So I'll eat them all if I can.
I said bigger on the inside before, but now I know that my body is like a bottomless pit. No matter how many of the wolf-beasts I consume, it doesn't show on the outside at all. Is it possible that I have a black hole for a stomach? Are glutton characters still considered cute these days? I think my species might actually need to eat a considerable amount all the time, so I can't help it.
Even with all of them inside me, I don't feel them weighing me down. I must have eaten about a ton of those wolf creatures just now, but there's no weight gain either. I'm still as light as I was before, which kind of defies all laws of physics.
Then again, this is a dream, so those laws have no meaning here. It's another indicator that this is just a dream. Just a dream!
That aside, these animals are pretty bland in their taste. Well, I say taste, but I'm not really using any taste buds. The sensation they give me while dissolving inside my body is nowhere as good as the ones I got from the various dishes made from the human king.
I can feel that I have more mass to work with now. After losing the lower half of my body and my arms during the teleportation, my matter had been severely limited. But now that I consumed so much and dissolved a lot of matter into my body, I can grow it all back.
No matter how I think about it, I'm really just like a slime. But I'm nowhere as weak as one; I mean, if I were a slime, the story would have ended with me getting hit once by a human I just caused a mild inconvenience to somewhere on a field, who will later grow into the fated hero who defeats the demon lord. Instead, I easily killed a bunch of monsters that seem more like midgame content. Alright, enough of these gaming analogies.
Now, let's aim for that huge cloud-like mountain-sized monster over there. Come what will, I'm invincible as long as I can change my body into the shape of a giant hedgehog with hard spikes.
Sea urchin? I have no idea what you mean; it's a cute hedgehog!
Hearing the rumbling of heavy footsteps, I hide in a brush and wait. While I doubt it's something I couldn't defeat, it's better to be wary in any case; I don't actually feel like waking up just yet.
What approaches is a giant Tyrannosaurus-like robot that could flatten me with a single step of its massive feet.
Most of its body is plated with gray steel panels, and the spaces between them show that cables are running through it, which are all covered in metal. In other words, everything about it is tougher than what I can produce; Hedgehog Mode will be useless against it.
I got carried away again, I'm sorry!
As if to mock my hubris from earlier, the robot dinosaur bites into the trunk of a tree, and the sound of a machine buzzing emerges from inside its metallic jaws. Splinters of wood fly everywhere and the tree is sawed down.
That's one of those tree-felling machines I saw on TV once!
But it seems to be more than just a machine, and it's walking on two feet. Well, it looks like a herbivore, so it shouldn't pose a threat to me. With it being so loud, there's no way to be surprised by it, so it can't be a hunter-predator.
A metal foot slams down right next to my hiding place, and my body jumps into the air a few inches. Turning my head, I look into the maw of another such cyber-dino.
Those are quite the impressive teeth, but are you brushing properly? You got some meat and fur stuck in there, you know?
Rolling on the floor in an unsightly fashion, I dodge the jaws of death. The brush I just occupied is crunched and disappears into the robot's mechanical stomach effortlessly.
That was too close for comfort!
Then I see its eye from up close. It's more like a camera lens, with what seems to be a floodlight lamp right next to it. The head somewhat resembles a box-like car - if a car could split at the grill and instead of an engine, it had a collection of saws and blades in there.
Wait, why are you looking at me like that? I'm inedible, so don't even think about it!
The other one also notices me and begins to approach. I can't fight these; they're practically living construction equipment!
I'm on the run once again, chased by these two huge cyber-dinos. Saying it like that sounds like a gag in a trashy movie, but when their jaws are humming with buzz saws, and their metal soles create small earthquakes with every step, I can't laugh about it at all.
What's with the sharp increase in the level of th
is area? The wolves are in a completely different league from these!
Speaking of wolves, why am I running in my human form? It's far less efficient when compared to that of a quadruped, especially in a forest.
With this though, I reach into my mind for the information I acquired through their genetic material and morph into one of those beasts still dissolving inside me. When I feel my new body, elation fills my mind at the thought that I can be anything I want and I forget the looming danger for a second.
The sound of saws buzzing behind me pulls me back into reality, and I take off running as fast as I can. With four legs made for sprinting, a whole new sensation washes over me. The wind in the fur feels really nice, as I speed through the forest effortlessly, and much faster than I have ever traveled in human form before.
The cyber-dinos soon give up when they realize that they can't catch up to me at all. While I have a feeling that they'll never tire, since they're literally machines, they must have some reason for not continuing the chase. In either case, as long as I remain in this form, I'll be able to outrun them easily.
Still, how am I supposed to fight them? I don't think bone or teeth are enough to even scratch them, and while they look slow, getting stepped on by them, or ending up between their jaws spells certain doom. In other words, I'd better steer clear of them until I know more about how they work, such as weak spots in the form of exterior gas tanks or something silly like that.
I've certainly learned a lesson from my encounter with the cyber-dinos; there's always a bigger fish.
And here I am, making my way towards the cloud-mountain thing again, which is most likely the biggest fish in this world. I'm sure there won't be any dangerous monsters around it, and since I'm so tiny, it won't notice me.
But if I could eat it, what would happen to me? My interior seems to be limitless, so if I can only create an opening big enough to pull that being inside, I'd be able to swallow it whole. I'm sure I'd have to really stretch myself open to take that giant thing inside me, though.
