I woke up to the sensation of mandibles clamping around my neck. My body reacted instantly, like a well-oiled machine. Instinct took over as I raised my arm between the pincers and my throat while my other hand drove a claw into the gap between the ant's head and thorax. The creature screeched—a high-pitched, grating sound that reverberated through the tunnel.
My tongue, now a bone spear, shot through the creature's skull. I didn't need to open my mouth anymore—most of my jaw was just bone now, after all.
Blood—thick, dark, and foul-smelling—spurted from the wound, splattering across my chest and face, but I was busy with more important things to care.
I fainted, I realized, due to blood loss, smack dab in the middle of the dungeon.
My mind remained calm, clinical, as I shoved the ant's twitching corpse off my chest. Rising to my feet, I immediately locked eyes with another one, its antennae twitching as it assessed me. No time to rest. I leapt at it, claws extended.
There was still slight bleeding in my abdomen, though Shadow Flesh had constricted the wound. Negligible damage, all things considered. The cut was deep, as it ought to be from a sharp blade, but the self-inflicted destruction of my mouth muscles was a tad more severe. On Earth, such wounds would have been fatal within minutes.
Here, they barely even lowered my combat effectiveness, if the slight dizziness from anemia was to be ignored.
My little performance worked too well. The amazons had panicked, and I'd been stabbed. Then I fainted... for a few minutes at most. Any longer, and I wouldn't have woken up at all, especially given the lingering scent of pheromones in the air from the first ant I killed, not to mention the one I was currently tearing apart.
The ant was strong, its exoskeleton thick and durable, but I knew its weak points now. My claws slashed through the air, striking the joints where its legs connected to its body. The creature screeched in pain, buckling instantly. I drove my claws deeper, ripping out its legs like weeds from the earth, fluid and entrails spilling onto the ground.
The creature died with a final, frantic screech, but not before its mandibles caught my left wrist, slicing deep into it. The pain was sharp, searing, but I ignored it as it was becoming laughably easy to do as of late.
For a single moment, as the second ant collapsed, its body a twitching, bleeding mess, I almost felt like sitting down and laughing. If I'd known the amazons would be so terrified of a lunatic Level 1 that they'd try to kill me, I might've played along with them. Hell, compared to dying in my sleep from blood loss or being eaten by ants, selling my freedom for a while wouldn't have been the worst outcome.
But dwelling on the humor and absurdity of the situation was pointless. I was still too weak, too vulnerable. A random whore could walk in and gut me like a fish. Heh.
Even as my thoughts wandered, my hands were busy, tearing apart the ant's remains with clinical precision. My claws pried open its carapace, sliced through its flesh, extracting the magic stone from its chest. I bit into it, the stone cracking between my teeth, the energy flooding my system, then I began devouring the other ant whole to stave the growing hunger in my veins.
The taste was acrid, bitter and metallic,but the magic stone-eating shortcut only worked when I was stacked on biomass so to say.
Crunching another magic stone between my teeth, I moved forward, my steps sure and steady. The wounds on my body throbbed, but they were nothing more than a dull ache now, easily ignored. Pain was just weakness leaving the body after all.
Though, as I walked deeper into the dungeon, I couldn't help but wonder why those amazons were looking for me. Did I grab more attention than I thought?
"By simply sleeping on the fucking floor? Unlikely, there must have been something I missed, but...well, who gives a shit?"
I had new traits to choose from after all. There was no space for petty venegance in my soul...
"Though I do wonder what skills you would offer me when we meet again...Samira, was it?"
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Choose a trait :
1- Compound Eyes - "Why have two eyes when you can have thousands?"
(Consist of thousands of tiny independent photoreception units.)(Can be turned on and off, can be activated for one eye or both)
Increased field of vision
Reaction time to fast moving objects increased by 50%
Image Resolution Lowered by 70%
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2 - Chitinous Exoskeleton - "Who needs steel when you have fibres?"
Grows a organic armor around the body, density scales with Endurance, Lowers mobility (armor tends to do that)
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3 - Fight Feromones - "Smells like death in here and I like it"
Your sweat glands now excrete a chemical factor that triggers anger in EVERY SPECIES CONSUMED so far. (Can be turned off.)