I've always felt empty.

Throughout my life, I've never done much. I lived, I breathed, I went through the motions. But there wasn't much else.

Ever since I was born, I was different. Unique. Somehow, I could only see the world in gray scale. Life was dull, monotonous. But so was I.

I had no opinions. No preferences. I made no friends, only spoke when spoken too. I did decent in school, I went because I was told to. I ate because I was told to. I drank, I breathed, I lived because I was told to.

What else could I do?

My parents' love faded with time. Deemed as a failure, they quickly moved on to other children. I didn't mind though. I just did what they wanted me to. What else could I do, but became what others wanted of me?

Like a sweeping river to a sandy mountain, or trained hands to clay, I was molded into something. My memories were distant, my touch was never my own.

What am I?

A human, I knew. A person, some said. I came to know the definition of one word; Individual. I was certain that was not what I was.

I cut myself to feel pain. I watched my blood drip and weakness flood my body.

I starved myself for that physical, hollow emptiness. My family noticed four weeks later, when they found my unconscious and emaciated body on my bedroom floor.

I drowned myself. I set myself aflame. I jumped off of buildings. I wondered, if in death, I could feel something?

My family told me to stop. So I did.

I tried drugs, to feel my body twist itself out of my control. I tried alcohol, to become something. It failed. I didn't hate myself, nor did I crave death. I just wanted something. Anything.

Opinions. Preferences. Wants. Needs. Likes and dislikes, love and hate. I figured, if I destroyed myself, I could feel. Wanting to continue, wanting to stop. Pain, fear, happiness, euphoria. None of that came. I was left with only silent emptiness.

I went back to my old life. Mornings and nights. Evenings and sunrises. Color and sound. Patterns and movement.

What's the point? A thought occurred. I tried to smile, stretching my face with my hands till it ripped at the seams. I was rushed to that white room with blood pooling in my eyes.

They talked about me. I felt their contempt, and wished to make it my own. I wished I wanted.

No matter how much I pulled at my skin. No matter how much I broke. No matter what they said, or the stares they threw my way. The pain, the silence, the sky, the whispers, the movement, the sound, the pattern, the shape.

Why? I asked the sky.

Purpose was the least of my worries. I simply wanted to have wants. I wanted greed and avarice. I wanted drive. Will.

I wanted to fill the emptiness, to be something. And I never succeeded.

My parents liked to look away. Voices grew hushed in my presence. My brothers and sisters, once so bright and cheerful, began to throw contempt my way. I wish I hated it.

I stood in my college dorm, enduring the usual shouting match from my roommates as I stared through the window at the clear sky.

The air seemed to still, as a cacophony of sounds made themselves known. My eyes grew heavy, so I lowered them slowly. My body sagged, and that constant, incessant beating in the right side of my chest finally ceased.

My body drifted in an abyss. I saw bubbles rise in columns all around me. I acknowledged my sinking existence as I plunged into the murky depths. The sky was dark, and the water tinted a sickly green.

The nothingness of the liquid coalesced around my body like a blanket, and it lulled me to sleep.

Time passed. The water shifted into patterns. It formed shapes and letters, stars and numbers. Content with boredom, I stayed floating in that abyss. Naturally, my limbs drifted into each square of formed liquid.

One day, it all ceased. No longer was I floating in some abyss, but on my knees in some jungle. I came to notice my body was no longer my own. The knees on the ground were not of flesh, but metal, as too were my hands and face.

I stood, testing the balance of my feet while shifting around. I was tall, towering over the neighboring foliage. I moved, and the forest lurched at the sound of screeching metal.

My chest was warm, and my stomach boiled. I walked until I found a pond and acknowledged my new existence. I was a monster. My body was now a symmetrical mish mash of rusty red and silver metal plates, like a combination of painted metal half melted off from time and smashed copper.

The word came to me like a viscous liquid finally unlatching itself from a rooftop. I was a knight. The armor plates making up my body were thick, heavy, and bunched together, every inch of me made up of metal layers overlapping each other every few centimeters.

My hands were just as complicated, my fingers made up of fifteen closely combined segments, with blunted fingertips and six fingers, four on each hand with a thumb on each side. My feet were made up of two parts, a long and wide back part, and an H shaped front part, which separated in the middle forming two toes of sloped metal.

In the middle of my chest, taking up the entirety of my upper torso sat some kind of furnace. Six bars covered the gap, which seemed to showcase my entire body all the way to the other side of my back. I was hollow.

Within the furnace cage, sat a small flame. Sparking and flickering as if struggling to breathe. In an instant, that flame fizzled, leaving only a bare spark struggling for life. My shoulders sagged, the metal screeching from the drawn out movement.

I felt. I wasn't sure what it was called, but I didn't like it. I looked to the side and saw a deer. It was drinking from the pond. Something made me move, both me and not me. I walked over to the deer, which looked up from its drink and stared at my encroaching hand.

I latched onto its flank and collapsed its spine. My hand only covering about half of it, but still more than enough to eclipse both of its shoulders. I squeezed, and the deer shrieked as its body collapsed inwards.

I reached over with my left hand and ripped its neck off, if only to stop its annoying screams. A feeling took over me. All feelings have been foreign so far, but this one felt even more so. With a rusty whine my metal rib cage unlatched itself, Each three pronged door opened to the sides lazily and swayed from my motion. The hinges moaning in protest with every movement.

I tore off a piece of the deer and sat back on the floor. I leaned back, letting the swinging doors touch my arms, and then dropped the piece of flesh into my chest. The flesh ignited upon contact with the spark, and upon incineration, the spark regained its fire.

A strange yet comfortable feeling overcame me. My movements became more. Refined, easy to make, controlled, powerful. My joints creaked a little less. I continued to tear off more chunks of the deer, feeding all of them to the furnace. When the flame resembled a roiling torch did the constant flow of deer finally cease.

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I understand those feelings now. The first was weakness. This one must be strength. But there was another feeling, a vast undercurrent to my whole being that seemed to drive my entire existence. It was… Intoxicating.

I wasn't sure what it was just yet. All I knew was that I needed more deer. That feeling of burning biomass… it was amazing. I stood up, and felt happiness at the smooth transition of my joints. I barely creaked at all now, and the power behind my movements was immense. This is what it's like to feel strong!

I picked myself up and began to wander around the world. The sun went through many cycles before a strange window appeared.

< Automatically activating due to inactivity>

< Summoning Status >

< Class - Ava-

I swatted the screen, and the red box dissipated like a cheap mirage. Over the next few cycles, the red patterned box continued to appear, desperately attempting to show me something. After around a week with no food, I lost the strength to swat away the screen, as I was forced to conserve energy.

Class - Avatar Adeptus | lv12 *******

Race - Ravager Furnace m

Health: 45000/45000 | Stamina: 45000/45000 | Biomass: 14/???

State - Hungry

Stp: 22 Skp: 9

Stats -

Body 450

Mind 20

Soul 0.01

Class Skills -

Unstoppable ||||||| lv1

Vessel Shift ||||||| lv1

Akashic Weaponry ||||||| lv1

Shapes -

I thought hard about the screen disappearing, and it did. No more annoying popups appeared after that.

I wandered for a long time. Through deserts and rainforests, plains and gravel seas. I simply continued to eat all I could. And while I wasn't unhappy, I had an odd feeling as well. Similar to before, but without the pain or emptiness.

I came to know it as greed.

The flame within my chest roiled within the furnace. Flame licked out of the grate. The fire had been fed into a cascading inferno, which filled the entirety of my chest. My body thrummed with power, orange lines tracing across my outline.

It was during the night, that I was attacked. Something of a medium size, slightly taller then my torso, but hunched. It was black and bony, with two legs and four arms and an unhinged jaw filling its entire face.

The creature jumped at me from my side, a blind spot. It tore at my metal. I grabbed the beast and flung it away, unconcerned, but it came back. After three more throws I became annoyed and punched it as hard as I could, but the force did no more than knock it back.

When I tried to rip it apart, it struggled out of my grip everytime. I grew more frustrated as it continued scraping my metal for days on end. Eventually, I put my all into killing the wretch.

I held the beast to the floor and pounded into its body over and over again. A warm yet bad feeling clouded my mind as I hammered into it faster and faster. My punches reached speeds they shouldn't have, as evidenced by the screeching sound I felt with my entire being.

I was on my knees, my right hand holding the struggling wretch down with my other hand raised in a fist. I punched and punched, the warm bad feeling boiling over into a wrathful inferno.

I felt anger.

The pounding stopped, I raised my fist once again, but this time, something changed. I channeled that energy, and the thick armor plates in my arm began to shift. The plates widened their distance from each other, making my arm almost twice as long, but they continued to transform, rolling around and changing the shape.

The almost triangular plates shifted to a vertical orientation, combining together like curving waves. The red copper metal melted and shifted back to my elbow, which I could feel reforming. Instinctively, I knew this was an improvement.

The liquidated metal flowed up to my shoulder as well. The actual bearing lifted out of my body, the metal on top shifted into a sharp shoulder pad sitting above the improved joint. I rolled the new arm, and felt satisfaction at its new mobility.

I hoisted the creature up by its leg and easily threw it hundreds of meters away. I noticed my hand still slipped like before, so I channeled that energy into it like before. Said energy felt different now, less primal, more refined.

I watched my hand transform. The three plates that made up the palm stretched out and divided into six, metal flowed and created more joints within the palm, while the thick plates of the fingers stretched out, more than doubling my fingers length.

Then, my fingers shortened as a third of it melted and danced across the back of my hand. My fingertips turned sharp, curved and wicked, as too were the backs of the fingers. I flexed my new arm, marveling out how light and fast the limb had become, while maintaining the same power as before.

I barely had to think about channeling the energy now, I just had to imagine the change and completely accept it for the modifications to take place. As a final small change, I opened the slot in my face. The two small rectangles that made up my eyes fused together, losing the wall in between them, and then widened into a visor around half my head.

The two red lights within my head fused together like magnets, forming one singular eye that was both larger and brighter, creating a star of red light to any watchers. Despite losing an eye, my field of vision actually increases, which lets me see when the monster lept at me again from my former blind spot.

I wrenched my left hand right into the creature's path, which fell into my grasp easily. I smashed it into the ground, then dug my changed right arm into its flesh, tearing into its tough hide. The monster thrashed, but it began violently screaming once I started eating its still living body.

It squirmed as I ripped off chunks of its body, as if begging for mercy.

What a wonderful feeling.

I thought.

Metal liquidated and flowed to my face, forming a wicked and lopsided grin across my otherwise smooth helmet. I stood from the cleaned bones of my once tormenter, and with a flex of that wonderful energy, I transformed.

My left arm widened and shifted into the longer, more vertical and twisted plates like my other arm. Unused metal flowed to my joints, fortifying them. My fingers elongated and gained sharp points.

Now symmetrical, the rest of my body began to shift as well. I stabbed my hands into the ground as my legs began to change shape. They shifted in a similar manner as my arms, the only deviation being slightly wider and shorter for support. My feet shrunk slightly, my toes shifted to a Y shape from the H that it was, the excess metal improving the ankle joints massively before the excess flowed to my chest.

My shoulders expanded outward as my head sank two inches downwards, making the slabs on top of my otherwise exposed shoulder bearings even more pronounced. Much of the excess liquid metal went to my furnace for strengthening. Two more bars were added to the grate, making eight in total.

The bars also projected outward more, looking less like bars and more like vertical ribs due to the slope. My torso slimed as the metal plates compacted together into a mural reminiscent of a six pack. Once I was done, I realized I still had an entire membrane of liquid metal sliding across my from like snakes searching for a purpose.

I had them reinforce my joints even more, and created mobile armor around all of them. I thickened all of my armor plating satisfactorily, but I still had much metal left. I had some of it flood up my head and turn into a crown, which had to remain hollow due to its weight.

It was at this time I noticed how unmaneuverable my neck was, so I was forced to slim it down. Upon modification, the once thick metal neck was now a shadow of its former self, now just two sticks attached to three ball bearings, my metal head sat atop, reminiscent of a vulture. It looked janky, as my brother used to say in my past life.

'My'.

The longer I live this life, the more defined I seem to become.

With my head now able to swivel like a goose, or other bird with a freakishly long neck, I was able to truly understand just how much metal I needed to work with. The flame within my furnace shuttered, and shed a layer of flame. I need more biomass, stat.

<Status?>

No, screw off.

Hastily, I drew all the metal to my back and created a spine of metal triangles, which not only gave me some previously unknown much needed back support, but also allowed me to have a tail. The tail was made of dozens of rhombus shaped metal plates, though hollow at the end. I plan on putting some kind of weapon there, but I need to address the balance issue first.

The sun broke over the horizon by the time I finally adjusted my legs to the weight, though now that I was done I realized just how much of a game changer a tail truly was. I was forced to remove my crown and shave down my shoulder pads a little as I formed a jagged short sword at the end of my tail, along with a mechanism that let me easily turn it.

I swished my new tail back and forth, the sheer lethality of my own design imbuing me with euphoria. My internal flame shed its warmth once again, and I felt the pangs of that now familiar feeling echo through my body once again.

With my new personal definition, I had now given this feeling a name. It was a negative one back in my old life, but in this one? It sang of new beginnings. The pride of the hunt, the anger of weakness, the lust of the kill. I came to understand it as the feeling that made this new me, me.

Hunger.

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