Legs

After eating her dinner, Alice worked on making more of the glowing water vessels with the limbs of the crawfish, hoping to obtain a way to decently illuminate her path in the larger cave.

Her efforts proved fruitful, and she was rewarded with a decent number of containers, which she filled with hide and carapace scraps in order to have the glow last longer.

While working on emptying the limbs of the meat contained within, she also kept exercising her power.

She would quickly break down the barrier of the well, the warmth flooding specific organs of her body, and quickly draining away as she mentally restored the veil an instant later. The effects on her body were minimal, numbing a specific finger, closing up a small wound or deafen herself for a few seconds, anything worked in the search for an increased control.

After a couple hours, too bored to continue with her energy manipulation, Alice finally went to rest. Only to awaken with a start a few seconds later as a realization dispelled any sleepiness left in her body.

“You absolute idiot!” she exclaimed while hitting her head with the palm of her hand.

“I’ve been doing all this work on the control of my body and power and everything and I haven’t taken a second glance at the new part of my body that I have no damned information about”.

She kept rambling on as she slowly sank in her own biological system, ignoring all information but the ones coming from her right arm.

She could feel the cells as they worked to repair the damage done by the salamander, the bone sealing itself where it was cut and the flesh working to cover the wound with a new layer of skin. As far as she could see, most of the cells in her stump had been touched by the specks of light contained in the water.

She was still unsure whether to think of those as living organisms, the round particles didn’t behave like normal cells, they simply fused with anything they came into contact with, permeating it with their essence and changing it in the meanwhile.

And what changes they were.

Alice had seen what happened to a body that came into contact with the specks, her own system breaking down itself to stave off the hostile takeover of its cells, the internal wounds that kept opening all over her system. A little shiver ran down the entranced girl’s spine.

Yet, she had survived and been fortified to boot. She could turn off the glow the cells produced or increase the effect to illuminate her surroundings, the new cells somehow resisted better than her normal ones to poison as her experiments with the spider fangs had shown, and who knew how many other things they could do?

First, Alice started experimenting on the most obvious feature of the new cells, their bioluminescence. Turning it on and off was the easiest part, simply a matter of inhibiting the production of a specific substance in the cell, which, to the surprise of none, seemed to aid or allow the digestion of biological matter. On the other hand, increasing the brightness, something she had done almost instinctively, seemed to actually be a very expensive effect to produce for her metabolism, as sugars and fats were sent in huge quantities to the flaring cells.

She found out that the cells had limits on how much light they could produce, which still turned out to be quite a lot, at least as much as a fire torch.

I guess no flashing the eyes of my enemies in the foreseeable future. Sad.

The high-power mode of the arm also had a few side effects; the temperature of the limb shot up until it felt like she had a fever localized entirely within her arm, and the energy consumption was huge, leaving her starving after only a few hours of continued use.

“Oh well, I won’t need to diet ever again. Nice” she said to herself while munching on more of the crayfish tail.

Next, she heavily numbed her arm before cutting her skin open with one of the dagger-like teeth of the spiders and letting its poison seep inside her veins, repeating the experiment she had conducted a few days before. This time, she watched as the paralyzing agent flowed inside her blood vessels, entered her muscles and started inhibiting any fiber it came in contact with.

However, a few seconds after the substance had begun its action, the mutated cells started glowing increasingly bright, somehow starting to digest the foreign substance and using it as a new type of fuel.

In a few minutes, any sign of numbing and paralysis had disappeared from her arm.

Absolutely crazy. Even when they are in my cells the specks of light digest anything organic they come in contact with.

After that, Alice quickly (and painfully) found out that the mutation didn’t offer increased resilience or regeneration to her tissues, effectively behaving like normal cells.

I really wish there was a better way to test all these things, but I cannot have another monster casually mutate and attack me. Also I cannot see inside of the body of someone else. Yet? I’ll try once I get another live specimen.

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow before exploring I’ll inspect the pool directly. Maybe I’ll be able to control the substance directly”. She yawned while curling back into her sleeping position.

“No luck”.

Alice sighed as she got up on her feet, shaking her hand to dry them off.

She had been kneeling in the same spot for more than fifteen minutes, trying to form a connection between her and the pool, and had only managed to get more bruises on her knees.

“I feel like I’m constantly almost there and I just can’t cross that limit”.

She put aside all thoughts on the matter as she geared up for her first in-depth exploration. The previous day had just been a simple reconnoiter, now it was time to dive in.

When she finally reached the bottom floor, Alice carefully placed at the base of the ladder one of the two torches she had brought with her, today in particular would be extremely important to be able to quickly fall back to safety.

She brought the second light source together with her, deciding to keep her own luminescence for emergencies.

After a lot of thinking, she had decided where to explore first. It had been a decision mainly based on distance versus safety, and she dearly hoped it had been a right one as she slowly, taking extreme care not to make any sound, and silently creeped into millipede’s territory.

After a few minutes, the first holes dug into the ground started to appear, most of their inhabitants thankfully asleep or away from their home. The burrows started small, no bigger than a fist, but as she went deeper in, they multiplied and grew in size in some sort of hierarchical organization.

Further inside, the activity of the insects seemed to increase, the armored arthropods probably confident enough in their numbers to do their bidding outside of the safety of their passages.

Alice scanned her surroundings for a safe spot to observe the happenings until she saw a rock outcropping wide enough for her to stand on, and only surrounded by a few very small nests.

She deftly climbed up on it and waited.

After a few hours, she heard a thrumming drone of insectile wings vibrating in the air. She looked up just in time to see a large swarm of wasps descend from their hive towards what seemed to be the stronghold of the millipede’s presence in the area, a flat swathe of land littered with tens of large bores in the limestone; they were attacking their unwitting neighbors where it hurt the most.

Alice increased the brightness of her arm just in time to see a few of the wasp lift one of the long and squirming bugs, carrying it up high where another group started piercing its softer underside with their stingers while using their powerful mandibles to munch through the tough chitinous shell.

With a disgusting bursting sound, the creature was split in half as strands of internal fluids spattered on the ground below.

Just as Alice was starting to feel sick, the bores exploded outwards as hundreds of millipedes of all sizes swarmed out in a frenzy of limbs and mandibles, immediately overpowering the few still grounded groups of wasps and tearing them apart in seconds.

A few of the enraged burrowers started scaling the slick limestone walls of the cave, trying to reach the looming hive on top of their head. Sadly for them, the wasps had been waiting just for that, as new, larger groups happily picked off the exposed creatures.

Then, as everything seemed to be calming down, the ground she was standing on started trembling, a sonorous crack resounded all over the cave as a meter-wide section of the squirming ground disappeared, replaced by a wide armored head armed with clicking dark mandibles.

After the head followed a plated body longer than a bus, completely covered in incredibly thick-looking armored plates. Its innumerable legs cracked the stone with each step as the being rose from the hidden depths beneath her feet.

Under Alice’s paralyzed eyes, a wave seemed to ripple through the limestone surrounding the beast, the material somehow becoming loose and pliable, before turning into long mineral blades that travelled like waves up to the large nest, breaking off one of its chunks and sending the hapless grubs contained within tumbling into the frenzied millipedes below.

What before had only been a drone, now was a cacophony of wings as the wasps went out en masse, the workers escorted by much larger soldiers, their lance-like stingers ready to strike.

Alice decided to quickly book it away, just as a brutal melee broke out between the warring species, the titanic millipede squishing friend and foe alike as it was pierced by hundreds of stings despite its armored physique.

Only when she reached the safety of her ledge did she hear the unmistakable noise of something large burrowing again, the sound of fighting turning into the creaking of munched corpses.

Ok. If every single one of the things in this cave has a mother or father like that I can forget about getting the heck out of here.

I bet that thing has a core as big as a melon. It used the stone like it was water! What the heck.

When she sat down back in her base, she conceded herself a small hysterical laugh.

“At the very least they are not good neighbors, maybe I can use that. Somehow”.