She made her way over to the area where her worm had stored the bodies, a large cavern she had the worms create under the tunnels.
It was isolated, with the only ways in and out being the tunnels made by the worms.
She planned to use this area in the future as her hive nest in New York, but for now, it was just a place to keep the bodies.
Upon reaching the cave, she looked over all the bodies she had collected during this mass hunt.
A total of 12 bodies lay before her.
12 innocent lives she had taken for her own selfish growth.
She wasn't proud of it, but she would do it again without hesitation.
It was the fastest way to grow; she would never jeopardize that growth over something like humane emotions.
So she ignored the emotions she felt about it and went about her plans to devour them.
First thing first, she didn't plan to eat them herself; in fact, she planned to have one of her worms eat one of the mutants to see just how much of their X-Gene she got.
She initially didn't do this because she was more focused on benefitting the most from the situation rather than testing the waters.
But she had enough mutants now to test the waters with, especially so since she had a few mutants that were useless to her.
Namely, the mutant that looked like a frog.
She had devoured multiple different types of frogs while in the forest, and due to this, she had a large portion of their capabilities, meaning this man would ultimately not be useful to her.
So she decided to use his body as the test subject for her experiment, ordering the worm to eat it.
The worm rose from the ground and grabbed the man in its mouth, its rows of teeth grinding the body apart and devouring it in chunks.
Blood, flesh, skin, bone, hair, everything that could be devoured from the man was devoured, and the only thing left when the worm spat him out was the clothing he wore and the parts not edible.
Once the worm had finished eating it, she could feel the rush of mass and information from the Hivemind, new coding being stored within her body at a rapid rate, as her Adaption kicked into overdrive, attempting to break it down and understand it.
Not just to understand but to alter it to fit her needs.
She realized that eating the mutant through the worm gave her fractured pieces of the coding needed to make the X-Gene; this made it so her body had to take time in order to try and piece it together and fill in any missing gaps.
It would generally be a waste of time and effort if it was used on a single body.
Still, she knew this could be useful later on when she started devouring on a mass scale.
A planetary scale.
For now, unless necessary, she wouldn't use her hive units to devour superpowered beings or beings with coding she wanted whole.
The mass she got from him was also not a lot, but it could also be to other factors.
With that test out of the way, she began to eat the ones she was least interested in first, saving the best for last.
The second one she ate was the man with the tail and ears; devouring him quickly, she could feel very minor changes happening within her.
His X-Gene was very similar to other abilities she had; even the X-Gene she got from the werecat dude before was somewhat similar to it, so the Adaption happened rather quickly.
She could feel the new power within her.
It wasn't much, she had capabilities similar to that of a dog, and if she wished, she could transform into a semi-dog form, growing ears, and a tail— like the man had— in order to boost her dog capabilities.
The power wasn't of much use to her currently, but she was sure that she could find uses for it eventually.
She moved on to eating the other man, that had an odd body, the one that looked like he had burned skin with boils all over.
She had her reservation about eating something that looked so odd, but her alien side didn't hesitate at all.
Devouring the body whole, she suddenly felt a burst of energy and mass within her.
She fell to her knees as her hand gripped the ground, cracking it, as she felt her body breaking apart from the inside out.
Calling it painful would be an understatement; it felt like her entire body was being ripped apart and pieced together again.
She could feel her body trying to Replicate the X-Gene from the man, but at the same time, it was trying to adapt the X-Gene to fit her body.
Radiation.
That was what she felt; she could just tell it was radiation.
She didn't know how; she just could.
The man was soaked in it, he was basically filled to the brim with radiation, and if she hadn't killed him as early as she did, he probably would've died in a few months or years at most.
He was a walking radiation bomb, and she had just eaten all that.
Her body tried to deal with the radiation the best she could, adapting and evolving at rapid rates.
Her skin was starting to burn, and boils began to appear on it, but in the next second, they vanished and returned to her normal skin.
The X-Gene from the man was the only thing saving her body at this point; it had the information needed to adapt a way to not only lessen but grant her a certain level of immunity to the radiation within her.
"Ah!"
She yelled as she slammed her hand on the ground, cracking it from the impact of her strength, her eyes dripping blood from the pain.
Suddenly her skin shattered like a layer of glass, and under it was a new layer of skin without a single blister.
Once that had happened, she released a sigh of relief, her body falling on the ground without an ounce of pain in it anymore, just tired muscles.
Her body had finally adapted to the radiation.
It fixed the X-Gene to fit her body, rather than how the X-Gene was trying to change her body to fit it.
Her body had evolved, shedding the old skin and starting anew.
All the injuries she had previously was healed, and she no longer had any pain.
She felt good.
She felt better.