Dawn of Hunger [Nonhuman FMC Progression]

58 - Revelation


Katherine "Nekomata" Legato

It hadn't been a long discussion. Really, how much had there been to discuss? In the end, she just found most of it to be—what, disappointing? She wasn't sure what she was supposed to feel about all of it. Of course, there were still a few more odds and ends she needed to have confirmed.

"So when you said that we'd almost surely test positive as Anathema—I guess that was just for Alex's benefit, then?"

Eigenmacht and Fabrica shared a glance. Then, they both peered at the new, Tier 8 Star Guardian silently standing watch over all of them. Shortly after Merlin and Bootstrap had both involuntarily departed, someone else from the other main faction had arrived to take their place—and seemingly to ensure that the others stayed in line. So far, they'd remained silent—and with a mask covering their face, it was hard to tell anything about them.

In fact, the entire person was covered in tactical, high-visibility outerwear. It was all entirely practical—maybe a bit too practical—and not all that different from the way Maria dressed for incursions.

Regardless, the other Tier 8 didn't say anything, so Eigenmacht continued. "No, actually. That was just a happy little bonus—it is true that Star Guardians will almost certainly test positive for Anathema seeding."

Really? Katherine wondered why. But before asking, she waited while the seated pair quietly discussed something between themselves, throwing occasional glances at the mysterious, third member present. Finally, after about thirty seconds of furtive deliberating, they both returned their attention to Katherine to address her again.

"As we've already come this far, we've decided that it would be worse to continue withholding the rest from you," Fabrica began. "As you already know, the root of the difference between Star Guardians and all other Guardians is possession of a Star Core. But what is it really, this thing embedded inside your chest? I'd be curious to hear your own interpretation, as from what I understand about your abilities, you should possess a greater capacity for self inspection than most at your tier."

Before Katherine could formulate an answer, the Tier 9 Star Guardian held up a hand. "You can tell me later, if you'd like. The main point is that there is little difference between a Star Core and any other Anathema seed. We are not Anathema, but the source of our abilities is one and the same. In some sense, we are still more human than most Guardians."

Katherine's mind began to race. Slowly, she took a seat at the table, not paying much attention to her actions as she did so. That doesn't—no. No, it does. She'd grown increasingly familiar with the types of spirits she regularly encountered. All humans were broadly the same—in the way all humans looked the same when compared to the appearance of a starfish or a tree—except for Guardians, Star Guardians, and, well, Anathema hybrids.

Katherine would never have questioned Frabrica's claim that Star Guardians were more human than regular Guardians. She already knew that. The alteration to her own spirit was clean, precise, minimal, and unintrusive. In comparison, the changes to all the other, ordinary Guardians she'd met since her own awakening had been messy and chaotic.

It's not like they're dysfunctional or poorly constructed, she mused. They're just not constructed at all. In a sense, the overall difference in form was akin to the difference between the chaotic tangle of biochemical machinery and something designed by an intelligent, thinking creator.

In contrast to the mutated, tangled, warped effect unique to Guardian spirits, Star Guardian spirits were like a person touching themselves through a discolored funhouse mirror, or perhaps interacting with a social media filter. There was a clear, symmetrical division, with the human half only altered just enough to interface with the double.

And as for Luna and Alex—well, both girls were something else entirely—but if anything, they were closer to the Star Guardians. The difference was that the pieces weren't separate but connected so intimately that they were a new, singular whole. A perfectly logical, conceptually coherent, unified collage between two distinct images.

The more she thought about it, the more it fit with her own observations.

Katherine realized that the room had stayed quiet. They all seemed to be giving her time to digest the bombshell that they'd just dropped. I guess—I guess that makes trying to create hybrids like Alex a bit more reasonable? Katherine wasn't sure if she wanted to try to convince herself of that. But then, if our Star Cores are just Anathema seeds…

"What is the difference?" She asked. "I mean—if it's really an Anathema seed in here," she tapped her chest, "then what makes us special? Why can't all the other people who get seeded become Star Guardians? Why do these experiments?"

"You're right," Eigenmacht said, "they are different. Star Cores are Anathema seeds, yes, but they're not just any Anathema seed. They take root, but don't grow further. Instead of growing like a tumor, mutating and eventually consuming the host until there's nothing left but the monster, they work with us, integrating perfectly as an additional, useful organ. We just don't understand how—or why. This is something we want to find out."

"It's true," the third Star Guardian grunted, speaking for the first time. "While many of us strongly disapprove of the methods that others of us have taken, we won't deny the basic reality. It's possible that the Cores were designed. It's also possible that they're just another Anathema type that happens to act symbiotically, in which case we're just the small minority that got lucky."

"But we already know the origin, right? The thing Alex told me about?"

All three high tier Star Guardians shared a glance. "What 'thing' did she tell you about?" Fabrica asked. She shot a suspicious look at Eigenmacht, who'd gone stone-faced. "Didn't one of your subjects awaken concurrently with Ms. Legato? Did she tell you something we didn't already know about the seeding process?"

Just when she'd started to get a grip on things again, Katherine found herself freshly bewildered and uncertain. Did I do something wrong? Why are they acting like this? Katherine herself had been dazed and dying at the time, and all she really recalled was a hazy memory of—was it a voice? She wasn't certain anymore. Given the way her power worked, it could very well have been an artifact of reacting to the new, spiritual, sensory overload.

What she did recall was how Alex described the event. She recalled it very well, actually.

"Looking up, I saw the sky turn a dark, purple black before it tore open, and then there was this tremendous light. I kind of wondered if I was dying. But then I realized the light was falling. Or really, it was more like it had been thrown by some giant cosmic hand.

"That's when I realized it was a Star Core—and it was heading for me.

"It slammed down into me with enough force to kick up dirt and leaves, but it somehow didn't hurt. Then the light faded, and the hole in the sky started closing—and this is actually the strangest part. There was this moment where I could actually look across that insane distance, and I really felt like I could see something so much bigger than me retracting its hand. And then—get this—it fucking spoke. It told me something like 'choose wisely' or some other creepy fortune cookie bullshit in this super deep voice.

"So yeah, that's what it was like for me. Was that similar to what you saw?"

Of course, now that she knew Alex had never even received a Star Core, it cast doubt on the description—unless—what if she did see it? What if she just described what she saw happen to me? Maybe she just told it to me that way, hoping it would make her own cover believable if she thought I had the same experience. Katherine realized everyone was looking at her again.

"Katherine," Fabrica said, her voice incredibly serious. Meanwhile, Eigenmacht continued to look unreadable. "What did Alex tell you?"

Alexis "Valkyrie" Huntingfield

Well that completely sucked. Reminder to self, don't let Luna get too powerful if you need to fight her. My latest matchup had been against yet another Tier 4, and this time, it was a lurker—the same Anathema type as my pseudo little sister.

Honestly, the lurker wasn't even in the top five most threatening Anathema I'd faced so far. If anything, I was the more powerful and dangerous one, despite still technically being a tier lower. That just went to show that it was more than just tier that mattered. The specific Anathema type mattered a great deal, and chameliums were seemingly pretty formidable opponents within any given weight class.

Similarly—and this went for Guardians as well—the specific abilities and unique variations also mattered. This became increasingly true with increasing tier, as esoteric abilities and unique mutations became more common, more significant, and more deadly.

Ultimately, what made the Tier 4 lurker such a miserable creature to fight was that it was just damn annoying. You could easily place fights on a two axis chart, with difficulty and frustration being separate axes. For example, the first proper Tier 4 fight Mr. Bones put me through—the smasher—was fairly challenging, but not at all annoying. Aside from the inherent difficulties and mortal danger, it was completely straightforward and reasonable.

The lurker, by contrast, was similarly difficult—accounting for my subsequent growth and increasingly developed abilities—but was just way more irritating to deal with. The stupid thing was fast—faster than me, even—and those sticky shadows were a complete nightmare. They tangled my limbs, jammed up my wings, and just generally made the whole thing frustrating and unpleasant.

The lurker itself was so good at stealth and evasion that Mr. Bones himself had to frequently get off his ass and stop it from just fucking off completely and leaving the makeshift arena behind. Something that ironically made it worse was that at no point did I ever feel endangered. It was like trying to swat a fly, except the fly actively taunted you and left gross, icky deposits all over the place like fucking Home Alone traps.

This was why I was now determined to absolutely crush Luna if we ever ended up on opposite sides of anything. Or maybe do my best to ignore her part of the conflict. It could really end up going either way.

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Winning once by using my brain and turning on the lights wasn't a guarantee that it would always be so easy.

Unfortunately, now wasn't a great time to go wandering off down the mental traintracks. I was starting to feel—weird. Also unfortunately, I realized Mr. Bones was already dragging in yet another contestant. Fuck. No. I think it's happening.

"Chill out a moment, I think I'm evolving."

I don't know if he responded or stopped hauling in the next Anathema. I just hunkered down with my wings folded, legs underneath, and tail folded around me. I couldn't spare the attention to focus on anything other than what was finally unfolding inside of me.

Uhgn. Why does it have to feel so—sucky? It was, in fact, sucky. I felt like I'd simultaneously swallowed several shots of whiskey and a vacuum cleaner on an empty stomach. Things inside had started churning, and—oh god. It's eating me. When I ate things, they didn't just disappear immediately, but there was definitely a point in the process where they were absorbed away into something completely non physical—or maybe there was a place that they went to, but it wasn't apparent in our three dimensional reality. I really wasn't sure.

Either way, that same process was currently happening to pieces of me. Cracking open my eyes—I just now realized they were squeezed shut—I beheld flakes of my metal carapace literally disintegrating into a fine powder that subsequently sucked down inwards through my rapidly corroding body. Well that's not completely disturbing.

Even through the quickly ramping pain, I was able to focus enough to notice that the weathering and corrosion was selective. Absolutely none of the Adamantite, as I'd learned it to be, was getting peeled away. In fact, the bits of exposed Adamantite I could see were becoming visibly more polished and refined. Dirt, oxides, and even metallic impurities withered away, leaving a much paler, slightly reddish-gold metal behind.

I'm eating my own junk, I realized, and I can't even stop it if I wanted to. Belatedly, I realized Mr. Bones had hopped down beside me.

"Focus," he commanded, "focus on what you are and what you want to be. What you can be. Take what you have and do everything you can to give it a clear idea of where it needs to go. But don't force it. You can't do anything to directly control what form your advancement takes. What you can do is give it the right intent, the right desire, the right idea, and your power will do what it can to best fulfill that vision."

I tried to nod or say something, but found that I couldn't. Mr. Bones seemed to get the idea anyway. "What is your power really? Now that you understand it better, what should it logically extend to? What makes sense to you, even if you can't explain how or why? What does it mean to be Alexis the chamelium? What do you need?"

I felt like this was starting to get a bit repetitive—but I banished the thought. He's a Tier 6. He reached the height of what most—ugh. What most regular Guardians can ever hope to achieve. He helped boost you to this point. Take—take it seriously.

Closing my eyes again, I thought about it. He says I can't force a specific ability, but I need to still provide my own guidance? And it has to make sense with what I already know. With what I have.

The pull inwards was getting stronger and stronger. I almost began to feel like my mind itself was being pulled inward. For a moment, I frantically tried to find the intangible leverage necessary to resist—but—do I need to? I let go. Oh. Well this is familiar.

I was drowning in a thick, heavy, pitch black sea of viscous fluid. It swallowed me, dragging me down, down, down, until I barely understood which way was 'up,' if such a concept had any meaning here. It was pure

hunger.

Except…

For the first time since hatching all those weeks ago, I wasn't hungry. My constant companion, my driving force—it wasn't gone, but it had gone quiet. Passive. Satisfied. In that moment, I realized the truth—that my great hunger wasn't bottomless. I was wrong to think that no matter how much I ate, it would never be enough—in reality, there was a point where it was enough. It just took eating a lot. A whole lot.

Immense—but finite. Which means…

It meant the unexpected reprieve was temporary. Instinct as much as induction told me that I couldn't stay here forever. The moment I reached tier 4, the hunger would return. It's not really an end to the hunger, is it then? It was just the passing illusion of it. See? Eat enough, and you'll fill yourself up! Then you'll get more powerful, which means you can eat even more! Maybe even enough to reach the tier after that! Be a good little monster and just keep eating, fighting, eating, and growing! It's what you're meant for!

It kind of majorly pissed me the fuck off, if I were being honest.

Fuck that—or something. I don't know. I forced myself to focus on the real task at hand. Heat, metal, and air. Vibration and flow. What was I?

I was strong, very strong. I was on the upper side of the literal strength scale, adjusting for tier, and likewise, I was incredibly durable, heavy, and solid—I was good at straightforward, simple, close-range combat. Strength, durability, and extreme regeneration are good—but I could certainly use a little more range.

I hadn't missed what Mr. Bones said about what my abilities could do. Aside from blasting shit like a dragon, I probably wasn't going to be firing off long distant shots or psychically manipulating a bunch of shit all over the place at Tier 4. It simply wasn't what I was set up for, not at the equivalent stage of a Tier 3 Guardian. It might come later, but for now—I recalled the way the smasher I fought empowered its attacks with a sheath of vibrating, compressed air.

That's exactly the kind of thing I need, isn't it?

I focused on the idea of strength, speed, and plowing through anything in my way like a bladed, Adamant bowling ball. I imagined not soaring, gliding flight, but rocketing through the skies like a missile, a fighter jet, a ballistic strike that would flatten the ground upon landing and obliterate anything that dared get close.

Heat. Light. Metal. Air. Sound. Vibration. Flow. I thought about big fucking guns, bombs, blowing shit up and smashing through anything that got in my way. Heavy ordinance, smoke filled battlefields, and hot metal slamming with the power of a big fucking internal combustion engine.

But I wasn't just heavy, loud, and destructive. I was graceful as well—I was lithe, flexible, fluid, and easily adaptable. I could make myself sound like anyone or anything, and hell, I was even capable of shapeshifting. I could present myself in whatever way I needed to appear, even without compromising my most consistent attributes.

And most of all? I'm a big, awesome, goddamn metal dragon. I didn't care that I was officially called something lame like 'chamelium,' or that I had six legs, or that I had something closer to armored plates than reptilian scales. I'm a literal dragon and I can just eat anyone who wants to debate me on that.

Yeah, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on what I was—and on what I was destined to be.

So—what now?

The entire pit of thick, suffocating tar rumbled, bubbled, and boiled. Power welled up all around me—and then I slammed back into consciousness in the exact same position I'd been in before. I doubted much time had passed at all.

The process wasn't done, of course. I was still the same as always, or rather, the same as I had been, but stripped away and corroded. I could feel that power condensing, transmuting, though, and then a new pressure built. It was similar to the pressure I now knew how to built in my chest as a devastating attack, yet also more. It surged up and out through my entire body, intently superheating it. Metal cracked, warped, and fused.

It hurt. It hurt a lot, but it was nothing that I couldn't handle. By this point, I knew with an instinctual certainty that all the conscious work was done. My body was now just along for the ride.

It was chaos. I could hear the crying strains of groaning, popping metal, the hum of thundering air, and even the crackling whiff of ozone. My entire form twisted and contorted, stretching and shifting into a new, altered configuration. Pieces clicked into place, temperatures spiked and plummeted, and then—it was simply over. Just like that.

I stretched. Did I get bigger—oh, yeah. I definitely got bigger. Much bigger. I would surely classify as a titan, now. Where before, my head reached the same height as it did in my upright, human posture, it now towered over Mr. Bones. I wasn't quite tall enough to see over the edge of the arena, but if I walked over to the edge, I could definitely peer over it if I stretched myself on my hind two legs.

Aside from being generally bigger in all ways, I'd also gotten taller. I felt much closer to a proper dragon than just an oversized cross between some kind of bug and a random lizard. As for the other obvious, physical changes—I inspected one of my forelegs. Rather than a dark, rough surface, the majority of my exposed surface was now a smooth and shiny, dark silver.

As for the Adamantite components, they too had become lighter and shinier. At first, it didn't seem like they were any larger—until I realized that I had grown much bigger. That was a lot more Adamantite.

Prowling around the arena, I liked the way I moved now. Despite being much, much bigger, I felt far more graceful—and elegant.

But this is just the beginning.

I didn't intend to spend most of my time in this form, no matter how cool it was. So, I promptly shifted back into my 'Valkyrie' form—and holy shit, it happened so much faster. It wasn't instant, but by my count, it took only ten seconds to shrink and shift down into a humanoid form. That was a huge improvement over the minute-plus time it took previously.

Inspecting my hands, I confirmed that the amount of Adamantite at my disposal had in fact grown tremendously. Before, only the very tips of my claws remained Adamant when I covered myself in armor. Now, my entire hand was covered in the stuff—the whole gauntlet. Wow. I imagined I could make great use of blocking attacks with that.

"Enjoying the results?"

Turning to face Mr. Bones, I nodded. "Yeah. Absolutely. But I'm just getting started."

I still had a whole suite of abilities to test, after all. Curling my right hand into a fist, I walked over to the arena gate. Misty white air condensed around my entire forearm, wreathing it in a miniature tempest. Heat gathered too, and by the time I reached the gate, I didn't have to wait before throwing a powerful punch.

The resulting shockwave should have pushed me back, yet I found myself utterly unmoved even as shards of aline bone rained down around me. Honestly, I barely even felt it. Looking back at Mr. Bones, I gave him a thumbs up. Then I tried something else.

Let's see what kind of range we're working with. It took less effort than I expected to whip up a milder—but still fairly intense—whirlwind around myself. Pushing it outwards, I was able to blow back a circle of sand with a radius at least a few meters away from me. Nice. What else can I do from a distance? I wonder if I can detect or control metal.

It was worth a shot. I doubted I'd be able to fling metal around telekinetically yet, but surely I'd gotten some advancement past my previous ability to mold it around with a touch. Come on. Surely there has to be some scrap metal around, right?

Casting my senses outwards, I tried to see if—a-ha! I found something. Focusing on it, I willed it to move.

I wasn't expecting much, and I certainly wasn't expecting an arc of violet lightning to blast out from my own body, exploding through sand and bone alike while turning bits of the former to superheated glass. And finally, I was definitely not expecting a rusty hunk of several pounds of unidentifiable scrap to rocket back towards me, pulled through anything and everything in its way by the same lightning until it smacked to a halt in my hand.

I looked between the hunk of metal and the visible path torn through the sand. It was remarkably similar to the way I summoned the sword my dad modified for me—but it was definitely different.

Dropping the rusty hunk, I looked back over to Mr. Bones again. "Well, uh. That was new."

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