A few minutes quickly passed, and the girl took the time to soothe her aching body, allowing her body to get used to the pain she was feeling and her muscles to release their tension.
It was a hard fight, probably the most challenging fight she had had since she came to this world, and the only reason she won was because of her tricks and that man's restrictions on himself.
He didn't intend to kill her, and his attacks were held back; if not, she would've died during that fight or, at the very least, won with a badly wounded body.
She was already injured, rather badly at that.
She was contemplating returning to her house for the day and stopping for the day here, but she decided against that.
Her plan for the night was to profit the most she could and attempt to gain a spike in power before things became complicated.
Shield, X-Men, and other heroes and villains were already in the city; two of those already had her on their radar.
She didn't want to risk being weak in such a situation; she, at the very least, wanted to have the ability needed to escape and survive an encounter with them.
'If I'm going to keep going, I need to find mass to speed up the healing process, but I can't eat him without risking the X-Men noticing me again like before.'
Lily thought to herself, her eyes lingering on the blood that had leaked from the corpse.
The corpse itself had already been moved thanks to her worm taking it away to where the others were, in a safe place within the sewers.
That's when an idea came to her mind.
'Wait, rats.'
She was in a sewer; it was filled with rats. She had seen multiple on the way here and simply ignored them.
But now that she was hungry for mass, she could use them as a quick source for mass, albeit and pretty bad one.
She wanted something a little better than just rats.
Still, she didn't have much of a choice right now, and she didn't know any other way to speed up her healing with her current capabilities.
So, she ordered the worms that lingered within the tunnels and underground to gather as many rats as possible and bring them back to her, dead but not eaten.
She wouldn't gain as much mass from them if her units ate it compared to if she had eaten it. Though it would generally be neglectable, she didn't want even a single mass to go to waste in this situation.
She also ordered the units that lived in the large nest within the forest she started in to hunt around and devour whatever they could.
While it would give her less than she would have gotten from eating it directly, it was still a lot.
And everything helped.
The worms moved quickly and collected rats and other sewer-dwelling animals. At the same time, her hive nest had done its best to devour whatever it could without suffering any loss.
Still, she did suffer a loss of two units because of a mistake she made in hunting.
But that wasn't worth dwelling on; they were replaceable.
She had now collected a good amount of mass from the things she had eaten, with a total of around 350 mass collected from the various small animals she had gotten her hands on and the hive had eaten.
It wasn't much, mainly because she was in a hurry, and she didn't go for large animals that would have more mass.
However, it was enough.
She was able to put 13 points into strength and 10 points into durability.
Increasing her current stats to;
Strength: 28
Durability: 40
Which not only increased her body's durability by a good margin but also helped boost her healing factor and constitution.
Her increase in strength was a safety measure in case she came across anyone that would force her into combat again.
But she had no intention of doing that if she could avoid it.
After about 30 minutes had passed, her bones had healed enough that she could get up without constantly being in pain.
As for her organs, while there was still some blood inside of them that shouldn't be there, her organs had pretty much started to heal already, and she would be acceptable to move around.
That doesn't mean she could go around fighting, though.
Fighting would make the wounds worsen, and she wasn't in her top state right now, so she didn't want to take any risk of getting into another fight like she just had.
But she was healed and could once again get moving and continue the hunt since some time had passed since she left. Morning would come soon, and she had to be back by then.
With that out of the way, so pushed herself back into a standing position and looked around.
Her scouts had informed her that a group of around three mutants was currently walking down one of the tunnels nearby, having come from somewhere, so she was going to deal with them next.
She returned to the same method she had used before, crawling along the ceiling of the tunnel and looking down at the targets below in order to avoid being seen.
Moving along the tunnels at a moderate speed, she soon came across the group she had spotted, a group of two men and one female, one of the men looked like some sort of horned humanoid creature, while the other man had a mask on his face.
The lady was the only one among them that seemed average, without much going for her as far as appearance went.