My teeth were already buried in the vulture's throat when its beak slammed into the hollow of the rib cage, missing my skull by less than an inch.
The impact rattled the skeleton beneath us. Rotten marrow cracked somewhere deep inside the titan's bones, sending vibrations through the carcass that had been my birthplace.
The vulture shrieked.
Up close, the sound was worse than before, like rusted metal grinding together.
I held on.
My small body clung to the bird's neck, claws digging through greasy feathers into the hot flesh beneath. My limbs were still soft, unfinished things, but desperation gave them strength.
The hunger in my chest roared.
My glowing core pulsed violently as the system flared across my vision.
[STABILITY: 3%]
[VOID STARVE IMMINENT]
Pain erupted inside my body.
My cells were collapsing. Breaking down for fuel.
If I didn't feed now, there wouldn't be anything left of me to save.
The pressure inside my chest surged.
The command came without words.
Consume.
The contact point between my claws and the vulture's neck began to glow with a pale, sickly light.
The system responded instantly.
[GENE STRIP ACTIVE]
[FORCED DIGESTION INITIATED]
Something thick rushed into me.
Heat. Life. Density.
The sensation was overwhelming. I felt the vulture's strength pouring through my claws like liquid iron, flooding into the hollow spaces inside my fragile body.
The bird's shriek turned into a wet choke.
The feathers around my grip lost their color, fading from oily black to dull gray. The muscle beneath sagged and withered as if decades of age had struck it in seconds.
System text flickered rapidly.
[BIOMASS ABSORBED: +1.2 KG]
[BIOMASS ABSORBED: +0.8 KG]
The surge of energy stabilized my failing body.
[STRUCTURAL STABILITY RESTORED: 88%]
[CURRENT BIOMASS: 2.0 KG]
The vulture panicked.
With a violent jerk of its neck, it ripped its head backward out of the rib cage, dragging me with it.
Suddenly we were no longer inside the titan's corpse.
The world exploded open around me.
The Rotting Forest stretched in every direction.
Black moss blanketed the ground like a diseased carpet. Towering trees rose into the purple sky, their trunks thick as buildings, their bark weeping dark sap that dripped endlessly into the soil.
Clouds of yellow spores drifted between the trunks like toxic fog.
The vulture thrashed wildly, trying to shake me loose.
I dangled from its throat like a parasite.
The bird slammed its back against a tree.
The impact crushed the air from my fragile body.
Something popped inside my torso.
Pain flashed through me as I lost my grip.
I fell.
The ground rose fast.
I hit the moss with a wet thud, my body bouncing slightly like a sack of gelatin.
The vulture landed a few feet away.
One side of its neck had collapsed into a shriveled, gray ruin where I had fed. Feathers hung loose around the dead tissue.
But the bird was still alive.
And furious.
It limped toward me, obsidian eyes blazing with animal rage.
Its taloned foot rose high above my fragile body.
For the first time since the fight began, I felt the weight inside my chest shift.
The biomass I had absorbed sat within my glowing core like heavy clay waiting to be shaped.
My instincts pushed toward the system again.
Protect.
The response came immediately.
A new window burned into my vision.
[TRAIT ACQUISITION AVAILABLE]
Chitinous Plating (Partial)
Cost: 1.8 KG Biomass
Penalty: –5% Stability
I didn't hesitate.
Yes.
The transformation began instantly.
There was no magic.
Only pain.
My back split open.
Translucent skin tore as something hard forced its way outward from beneath the surface. Black plates erupted through the flesh, slick with dark fluid, before hardening in the open air.
The material felt dense. Jagged. Alien.
Each plate locked into place along my spine like shards of sharpened bone.
The vulture's talon came down.
Instead of crushing me, the bird screamed.
Its foot had landed directly on the new ridges of my armor.
The jagged plates punched into the soft underside of its talon.
The force of the stomp still drove me into the moss, pressure vibrating through my fragile insides.
System text pulsed again.
[STABILITY: 83%]
[MUTATION STRESS DETECTED]
The biomass inside me was gone.
Burned away to create the armor.
I dragged myself forward.
The new plates were heavy, pulling at my small body. My movements were slow and clumsy now, my claws struggling to grip the moss beneath me.
The vulture backed away, limping.
Its obsidian eye never left me.
For the first time since spotting me, the bird hesitated.
Then its wings spread.
It was going to leave.
Panic surged through my core.
That bird was my only food source.
If it escaped into the Rotting Forest, I would starve before I found another creature weak enough to hunt.
I tried to chase it.
My body moved too slowly.
The armor had made me heavier.
Too heavy.
Then the forest went silent.
The vulture froze.
Its wings stopped mid-motion.
The constant drone of insects vanished. Even the drifting spores seemed to pause in the air.
A low vibration spread through the ground.
It wasn't a sound.
It was a frequency that made my cells ache.
The vulture forgot about me completely.
Instead it turned and began hopping away in a frantic, panicked scramble.
Something moved behind one of the towering trees.
A shadow stretched across the clearing.
Long.
Jagged.
At least twenty feet.
Then came the sound.
A thousand tiny glass needles snapping at once.
The creature burst from the undergrowth.
It moved so fast that the vulture never had time to scream.
Pale, multi-jointed limbs slammed the bird into the moss.
The predator pinned it effortlessly.
I lay frozen nearby, my glowing core hammering beneath the black plates.
The newcomer looked like a praying mantis sculpted from bleached human bone.
Its body was long and skeletal, each limb ending in serrated edges sharp enough to cut stone. Its head was smooth and dome-shaped, broken only by a narrow vertical slit that glowed faint green.
The mantis did not eat.
It simply held the vulture down.
The dying bird kicked weakly beneath its claws.
The mantis watched.
Cold.
Patient.
The green slit slowly rotated.
And then it pointed directly at me.
The system screamed.
[WARNING: LEVEL 4 APEX PREDATOR DETECTED]
[DETECTION STATUS: COMPROMISED]
The bone mantis stepped over the vulture's body like it was nothing more than fallen debris.
Its towering shadow swallowed me completely.
I checked my reserves instinctively.
[REMAINING BIOMASS: 0.2 KG]
[STABILITY: 83%]
My armor made me too slow to escape.
My body was still weak from mutation.
And the creature staring down at me was something far worse than the scavenger I had barely survived.
The vulture had never been the real monster here.
I was just the appetizer.