Yes.
Kaelen didn’t hesitate, and hesitation was a luxury for things with more than one hit point.
[Ding!
Infection Initiated.]
The world went from cold stone to hot copper in half a second.
He pressed his hand against the wound, like water finding a crack, not thinking, not planning, simply trusting that where he was going to be safer than where he was.
The wolf’s blood welled over him, thick and scalding, and for an immeasurable moment Kaelen forgot he’d ever had a name.
Move.
Keep moving.
Stopping meant dieing.
The blood stream wasn’t a river.
It wasn’t even a highway – it was traffic-free, but the current dragged and tugged at him with every beat of the wounded wolf’s heart, and Kaelen didn’t fight it, not really, not the way a man might fight a current in a river.
No, he let it push him along the same way he’d seen the leaf in the video game do when the flood-waters came, not struggling but floating instead.
“Estimated distance to brain stem: forty of your current body-lengths,” Nix droned.
“Time until host expires from blood loss: two minutes, eleven seconds.”
That wasn’t helpful.
Don’t be like that.
Give me something useful.
“Recommendation: hurry.”
Fantastic system.
Top-tier customer service.
Something large and pale and wrong crept toward him through the red haze, rounded and bristling.
A white blood cell, the size of a boulder compared to him, its surface studded with jagged proteins like a mace of teeth.
It hit him.
No, that wasn’t the right word.
It wasn’t pain.
It was more like being erased, a section of his thin body simply dissolving under the attack of whatever acid the creature was carrying.
[HP: 1/1 — Sub-cellular structure intact.
Damage absorbed by non-critical tissue.]
Non-critical tissue.
Kaelen barely laughed.
I am one hundred percent non-critical tissue.
He didn’t try to fight it off, not directly, not when a single blast from the thing’s surface could liquefy him.
Instead he did what his instincts told him to do, the only thing he could be sure of doing in this body.
He slipped.
Thin, impossibly thin, and he curled himself around the cell’s attack instead of in it, forcing the boulder-like creature to pass through the space where he’d been, pushing himself further along the current with the movement.
[Passive Skill Detected: Void Slip — Reduces collision damage by phasing through non-solid matter.]
Didn’t know I could do that.
“You didn’t,” Nix said.
“The Devourer class generates emergency mutations reactively.
You would be dead nine times over without them.
Try not to rely on luck.”
I’ll rely on whatever keeps me alive thanks.
More of them came, dozens then hundreds, the dying wolf’s body throwing everything it had at the invader burrowing through its veins.
Kaelen slipped and dodged and curled in on himself, taking two more glancing blows that shaved off slivers of whatever skin he had left, and kept moving, kept moving because the current was pulling him upwards now, through the narrowing channel of the vein, past the base of the skull and into the brain stem, the prize at the end.
The vein pinched shut, then narrowed again, forcing him through a space barely wider than his body, into a chamber that pulsed to a different rhythm than the heart that had sent him this far, slower and more electric, threaded with something that reminded him of lightning in a rope of water.
The brain stem.
[Target Located: Host Neural Core.]
[Infection Progress: 14%…
31%…
58%…]
The wolf’s mind fought him off, and Kaelen sensed the shift as panic, and then a great and terrible fear, primal and bestial, that something had invaded where something should have stayed.
He didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, because somewhere in the world behind him a boy lay dying, not on the clock at all but with no second chances to try again, and the boy’s mind still lived in a hospital room three days from now.
I’m not losing you again, Lyra.
[Infection Progress: 79%…
94%…]
[Ding!
Infection Progress: 100%.
Host Hijacked Successfully.]
Everything went white, then black, then
Kaelen opened his eyes.
Eyes.
Real ones, two of them, blinking against dimly-lit cave walls that reminded him of sunlight, however many hours or days he’d spent blind in this place.
He looked down and saw paws instead of hands, black fur matted against his chest with his own blood, and claws the length of kitchen knives biting into stone.
He stood.
The wolf’s body responded to him the way any muscle should, the strange bones of its spine already habituated to the idea of carrying a man instead of a beast, and after the experience of a body with no legs at all, Kaelen marveled at the sensation of standing, even if only for the length of time he could spare.
Which was about four seconds.
[Ding!
Host Assimilation Complete.]
[Displaying critical stats only:]
> HP: 1/1 (Sub-cellular core) — 340/340 (Borrowed Host Vessel) > Skill Retained: [Shadow Fade] — reduces detection in low light.
> Warning: Host vessel is not permanent.
Core organism remains fragile.
Vessel death does not guarantee core survival.
Three hundred and forty hit points.
Kaelen felt something in his chest — the wolf’s chest, technically, but his now — loosen, for the first time since the Awakening Chamber.
Three hundred and forty.
I went from one to three hundred and forty.
“Do not celebrate,” Nix said.
“You are still one solid hit from permanent death.
The host merely delays the math.”
“You couldn’t just let me have a second,” Kaelen muttered, and stopped, startled at the low, rough growl that escaped his throat – the wolf’s throat, actually, not his own voice at all.
That would take some getting used to.
He flexed a paw, watching the claws catch the torchlight, and for three days he’d been a boy in a jumpsuit, or nothing at all, or a worm no bigger than a heartbeat, and now – here, now, standing in a body stolen from death itself – Kaelen thought about hope, something he hadn’t allowed himself to think about since the day he’d died.
It lasted exactly as long as it took for the arrow to find him.
The force of the impact threw him off balance, a length of steel burying itself deep into the muscle of his – the wolf’s – shoulder, and the pain wasn’t the neat, distant pain of the fight in the blood stream.
This was his pain now, right down to the fine nerves in his new body.
[Warning: Host vessel HP: 340 -> 289.]
Kaelen staggered, one paw catching on the wall of the cave to keep himself from falling, and turned towards the tunnel’s mouth.
Torchlight.
Voices.
Boots on stone, four sets maybe five, steady in their tread and casual in their confidence, the manner of those who hunted things like Kaelen for sport.
“There’s the wolf that gutted Renn,” someone said, and there was no fear in the voice at all.
Just satisfaction, the calm certainty of a man who’d done his job and was about to finish it.
“Looks half dead already.
Easy kill.”
Steel sang from scabbards, four more figures crowding into the torchlight beyond the first, their blades held low and ready, another arrow already knocked and aimed at the wound in Kaelen’s borrowed chest.
“Threat assessment,” Nix said, and for once there was no monotone to its voice at all, just cold, flat urgency.
“Five armed humans.
Current host HP: 289.
Estimated time to vessel failure if engaged: under ninety seconds.”
Kaelen bared the teeth of the wolf, letting the blood well from the wound and pool at his paws, and forced himself to think past the agony lancing up his new spine.
I just got a body.
I am not losing it in the first five minutes.
The hunter with the bow smiled, raising his weapon to take another shot.
[Ding!
New Skill Available: Void Slip (Combat Application Unlocked).]
[Warning: Skill activation will drain remaining host HP by 20%.]
The bowman’s finger tightened on the string.