A Nice Primal Zerg Si fic
Words: 19k
Link: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lakes-of-green-reloaded-primal-zerg-si.55243/
Chapter 1: Life's Purpose.
Crunch, Crack, Chomp.
Ah. Delicious. There is something beautiful about the feeling of eating something you catch yourself. It just tastes... Sweeter. You feel proud of yourself. like you've accomplished something. Fed your family for a week, or something like that.
Crunch.
Of course, that feels entirely different from how I feel now. I feel Alive. Like this is my Purpose. Now before you go saying I'm a psychopath for thinking that killing and eating things is my life's purpose, I have an extremely good explanation.
I'm a Primal Zerg and can't hear your crying ass. Ha. So there.
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Life as a Primal Zerg is repetitive. You wake up from the torpor you have to have to allow yourself to function, but also not allowing yourself the blissful defencelessness of sleep. You go out hunting for food and make sure to avoid ~80% of the population, focusing on the things you CAN kill. You are inevitably chased by something bigger and stronger than you, so you hide, but it finds you. So you ambush it, trap it, kill it, eat it and make it's strongest traits your own.
Such is life on Zerus.
As I jet along in the tinged-green waters, dodging the lunging seaweed, I once again ponder why my life is like this. Then I remember.
Fuck ROB. I don't even know if it's a future me putting me on the path to become a ROB to complete a time loop, or just a sadistic asshole looking to get his jollies off.
Either way, fuck you Future Me/Asshole. Some warning would be nice. Just dumping me into a helpless fish with no explanation could have ended very badly for me.
I pull myself from my thoughts in time to Aileron-Roll past a toothed maw that almost got me. Right, right. Being chased through the Carnivorous Kelp Forest... You know, that one sentence applies to my entire time on this Xel'naga forsaken world.
But yeah. Being chased. Like I said before that's my every day. This time it's this squid-looking motherfucker. It looks like a squid from good old Earth, with a fuck-off sharp blade on the tip of its head and eyes all over it's brain-case.
It's single-minded in its pursuit, cutting right through the kelp with its bladed head whilst I have to dodge, duck and weave. That also means it's catching up. I duck behind a large bit of seaweed ahead, and float up, out of the way of it's projected path.
After a beat of my two hearts, it rips through the kelp and right into my trap. I tense my tentacles and with a pistol-quick movement it's wrapped up in my many arms and pulled up to the serrated beak that serves as my food in-hole.
Crunch, Crack, Chomp.
Ah. Delicious.
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So at this point you're probably wondering what I look like. Well, I'm currently the unholy chimera of a Jellyfish, Octopus, and Squid.
I have 8 long, thick, muscled outer tentacles. Two were longer and had thick pad-like things on the ends. These are my primary entrappers and manipulators. They are covered in small thorns and suckers that help them stick and rip into prey. These thorns are also coated in a potent neurotoxin, amalgamated and improved from a hundred different sources. (Though given a Zerg's adaptivity, it'll only work once) Trailing from these tentacles are hundreds of extremely long and thin tendrils. These I don't particularly care about, hence the large number of them. They're good for immobilizing prey quickly.
My main body is a scaled case containing my organs. The scales are ablative, regrowing when they fall off. Under that is a thick hide, which covers a thin skull. This skull is made of plates bound together at the edges by flexible cartilage and strong tendons. I have 4 large eyes on one side in a diamond formation, with smaller eyes all over my body. Those smaller eyes were heat-sensors, giving me 360 thermal vision.
The larger eyes each performed a different function. Going clockwise from the top, the first was Low-Light and had an eyelid that covered it when it was too bright. The second was motion based, made for open water and useless in the shifting kelp forests. The third was X-ray, or as close as I could get. It let me find weak spots in armor and kinda see through the thin parts of the kelp. Finally, was a normal eye. Though it did have many more color-receptors in its retina and a few more focusing lenses than the human eye. I really was blind, as a human.
As I dug into the flesh of my ex-pursuer, I was mentally accepting and dismissing parts of its essence.
Essence is Strange with a capital S. It's part meta-physical energy, part biomass, and part genetic code. The genetic and biomass parts improve my physical body; changing and rearranging my genetics, and the fuel to implement the changes.
The energy, I couldn't yet trace. I felt it enter me, filing some part of me. Then I lost track of it.
There were a few things that this squid had that I wanted. Its musculature system was overall weaker than mine but what I was interested in is the arrangement of muscles that let it jet along so quickly. It took in water with a gill-like system, then put pressure on the water as it went through a valve system, eventually leaving the body at speed. Small changes were made to the holes in the arm-pits of my tentacles and a quick test pushed me along quite quickly.
The blade on its head was made with a bio-metal. Some strange carbon-titanium mix. I spread that out across my whole skull. Though I did focus some of it into my larger two tentacles, giving them small but sharp blades. I pushed the carcass away, watching as scavengers descended on it, looking for any scraps of Essence I didn't take.
I made sure to get out of there as fast as I could. Didn't want to encounter the local gang, after all.