Chapter 2: Into the Cavern.

  Lucas awoke into a blackness so absolute it felt like a suffocating blanket, pressing down on him from every direction. He instinctively tried to breathe, only to find he had no lungs, no mouth, no pulse hammering within him.

  Panic began to swell, but something deep within, something instinctive yet unfamiliar—held him steady. It was as though his body already knew what to do yet, his mind lagged behind.

  Disoriented, he strained to remember where he’d come from. The strange and horrifying world-shaking events that occurred while he was in his school, that eerie blank void, and that incomprehensible presence which seemed responsible for destroying his entire world. All these memories flowed into his mind like a raging river. All the strong emotions he felt during those events surged back into his mind.

  Lucas just sat where he was for a moment, trying to process everything.

  ‘Okay, Lucas, let's calm down and assess the situation. It can't be that bad right?’

  Lucas attempted to encourage himself.

  He patiently began to pay closer attention to how he felt at the moment. His senses immediately informed him of a few key details he had not picked up in his panic.

  Wherever he was, it was rather cold and damp. A chill seemed to hover, faint but unshakable, mingling with the heavy, stale air around him, which reeked faintly of rot and wet stone.

  Taking note of this, a new sensation rippled over him—a slithering movement he couldn’t control. His skin felt wrong, not skin at all, but something pliable, ever-shifting, and struggling.

  'I’m… not me?'

  He thought in surprise, though what he had become remained elusive. His mind began to spiral and his form writhed even more chaotically, producing wet tendrils at random which slapped against the wet rock around him.

  ‘No! This can’t be happening.’

  Before he could go into a full panic attack, that deep alien instinct tugged at his mind once more. It calmed his mind and soothed his rampaging emotions.

  A few seconds later, he was calm enough to brush off his panic for the time being and gave himself a new task.

  ‘I can’t panic now. I don’t know where I am, so let’s try moving first.’

  He tried to stretch forward experimentally, sending a ripple outward. Tendrils—or something resembling limbs—flopped against cold stone with a faint, wet slap. His attempts to control the movements only underscored how alien his new form was.

  The familiar awareness he once had of his muscles, his balance, and his center of gravity was gone, replaced with a sickening uncertainty. His whole body was unsteady, shifting and changing with every thought, resisting his attempts to shape it.

  ‘What the hell??’

  Frustration and confusion simmered within him, twisting into anger and helplessness. Every movement felt clumsy, beyond his control. He remembered the ease with which he’d once moved, how his human body had felt like an extension of his will.

  Now, he was trapped in a form that defied him, that flexed and morphed without rhyme or reason. His emotions stirred once more—a raw blend of fear, irritation, and something darker, a grief for the body he’d lost.

  ‘No… I can do this. I chose this, didn't I? I just have to put in the work. I can do this.’

  He tried to console himself. But as he felt his body vibrate chaotically as if in response to his thoughts, he could not help but feel a deep disgust.

  ‘Let’s keep pushing.’

  Bit by bit, through sheer grit, he managed to extend a tendril, feeling it press firmly against the damp stone beneath him. He experimented, forcing himself to anchor to the ground, to pull himself forward, even as resentment gnawed at him. Every inch he gained felt less like progress and more like an endless struggle.

  Yet as he pushed forward into the unknown, he clung to a glimmer of determination, a primal urge to survive and make sense of this strange situation. He couldn’t afford to give in to frustration. He would learn this form, as foreign as it was, and he would figure out why he was here, no matter how alien or hostile his own body felt.

  Lucas pushed forward, each slither and stretch a clumsy attempt at movement. His whole form essentially flopped forward slightly each time he willed himself to move. Every inch forward felt like a small victory, but the darkness loomed, pressing in on him with suffocating weight.

  Then, breaking the silence, came a screen of plain text. Projected directly into his mind, the panel read.

  {Status system, initializing.}

  ‘Huh?’

  Lucas just stared at the screen blankly, unable to wrap his head around this new development. Seeing that the screen just sat there, he took the initiative to try and communicate with it.

  ‘Umm… hello? Is anyone there…? Where am I? And why am I like this?’

  The screen just absorbed his questions, offering no response. After a tense, waiting moment, it flickered. New text appeared on it almost instantly.

  {Adaptation. That is the essence of what you are now.}

  ‘Adaptation?’ he echoed, frustration edging into his thoughts. ‘How? I don’t even know what I am. What happened to me!?’

  His words—his thoughts—were desperate, but the screen ignored them. He stopped and waited, thinking the text might have more to say. But after waiting for what felt like a few minutes, the only thing that greeted him was silence.

  Lucas then sighed internally and slithered further, he pushed tendrils outward, skimming the cool, damp stone walls. Sounds filtered through, tiny echoes of distant skittering and faint drips of water.

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  He hesitated, the unfamiliar sensations leaving him reeling, but the screen changed once more. The sentence on it this time was just as simple and as confusing as the last time before vanishing, leaving him in darkness once more.

  {Let your instincts guide you.}

  'What does that even mean?! That's just cryptic BS!'

  A pulse of irritation and fury burned within him. This whole situation seemed set up just to mess with him but he refused to be pushed around any further. That alien instinct pulsed within him once more, cooling his mind.

  ‘No, no, no. I can't lose my cool right now. I will have all the time in the world to break down later.’

  After calming himself, he thought about the screen and drew a few conclusions.

  ‘It was probably some type of recorded message but from who…? That… thing?’

  His mind went to the cosmic entity that destroyed his world. It sounded plausible but he has too little information on hand.

  'It doesn't matter... I should just figure out how to move properly first before worrying about cryptic messages.'

  With that thought in mind, he stretched a tendril forward once more, brushing it against the ground and pulling himself forward. He’d adapt, he told himself, if only to prove he could survive.

  As Lucas pressed onward, the darkness remained unyielding, yet he felt an unsettling shift in the air, the atmosphere thickening around him. Strange sounds echoed in the distance—scrapes and grunts, punctuated by a faint rustling like claws skittering over rock. He froze, tendrils quivering as a primal instinct gripped him, something deep in his core told him to shrink back, to stay hidden.

  But he couldn’t see, couldn’t retreat into the safety of familiarity. Every strange new appendage he stretched out felt raw and exposed, his hearing heightened but alien. The faint, unsettling noises grew louder, bouncing off the cavern walls, growing in his awareness until they seemed almost tangible in the pressing darkness.

  Then, abruptly, the panel returned, cutting through his silent terror with its calm black text on a white background.

  {Creatures lurk in this cavern. They can be hostile. Stay vigilant.}

  It stated simply.

  Lucas’s thoughts tumbled into a panic. ‘What kind of creatures?’ he asked, dread froze him in like ice through his mind. The thought of being mauled by wild animals while blind and incapable of escaping sent a jolt of terror through him.

  The screen changed once more, reading.

  {Focus. You must learn to navigate this environment. Open your status screen.}

  He blinked, or at least tried to—an old reflex that no longer worked in this new, unblinking form.

  ‘Status screen?’

  He thought, the confusion swirling in his mind somehow grounding him. What did that even mean? How was he supposed to focus on something he couldn’t see, couldn’t feel?

  {Concentrate. Visualize it.}

  Lucas hesitated, but then, swallowing his doubts, he reached inward, focusing his awareness, trying to picture a screen in his mind. It felt absurd, like a child’s game, yet something within him responded.

  The darkness parted slightly in his thoughts, and suddenly, as though emerging from a fog, a translucent screen materialized in his mind standing side by side with the screen of text.

  Lines of text appeared on it, stark and clinical, each word clear yet oddly detached, like they were written for someone else.

  ————

  [STATUS]

  Name: Lucas Maverick

  Species: Mimic

  Tier: 0

  Level: 1

  Essence: Freedom

  Achievements: [Anomaly]

  Attributes:

  ?Physique: 1

  ?Spirit: 1

  ?Mind: 1

  Skills:

  ?Guide [Special]

  ?Mimicry [Level 1]

  ?Leech [Level 1]

  ?Spirit Sense [Level 1]

  Attribute points: 0

  ————

  The sheer weight of the information flooded his thoughts, each line pulling at a different thread of his bewilderment. After skimming through it, one particular line caught his attention.

  ‘I’m a mimic??’

  Ignoring his question, the screen changed once more.

  {Strive to master your skills.}

  ‘But I don’t even know how to use them! You know what? Just shut up!’

  He shot back, frustration bubbling beneath his surface once more. The only response he got was an overwhelming silence as both screens faded away.

  Reeling in his emotions, Lucas kept moving, pushing himself forward in what he hoped was a straight line. He had no real goal, no sense of direction, no map to guide him. But movement, even this clumsy crawl, gave him a fragile sense of control in this unfamiliar darkness. Every ripple, every inch forward, was his way of defying the helplessness that threatened to swallow him whole.

  The sounds grew louder as he went on, filling the emptiness around him with a new, visceral unease. Scraping claws against stone. Low, rumbling growls that seemed to vibrate through the air and sink deep into his amorphous form, like distant thunder. Each noise triggered a tremor of instinctive fear that pulsed through his strange, volatile body, a constant reminder that he was not alone here. Whatever made those sounds were alive—and moving closer.

  'Think, Lucas,' he told himself, gripping onto the thought as if it were an anchor. 'There has to be a way out of this.'

  He forced his breathing—well, his awareness—to steady, to focus, calming the frantic urge to panic. And then, as he slowed his pace and quieted his mind, something unexpected began to happen. The sounds—the scraping, the growling, the subtle shifting of stone—became more distinct. They didn’t just register as noise but painted strange, blurry impressions in his mind like foggy, grey shadows moving against the dark.

  Curiosity overtook him. He let go of every other thought and instead concentrated solely on his hearing, listening with an intensity he’d never thought possible.

  It was almost like a switch had been flipped. Each sound became sharper, more defined, no longer just a directionless clamor in the blackness but layered with depth and texture. Slowly, as he tuned in further, the world around him began to form into an image, a landscape built entirely from sound.

  In his mind, he could “see” it. Fuzzy impressions of walls, rough and jagged. The cold, uneven floor was littered with debris. Grey outlines of moving shapes, their footsteps rough and uneven, scratching against the stone with each step. The creatures from before, they were close now, shuffling slowly but steadily toward him.

  ‘I can see…’

  The thought flickered with astonishment, almost disbelief. Though he had no eyes, no vision as he once knew it, the sounds around him created something close enough to sight. An outline of the surroundings stretched out in his mind—a mental map, very imperfect and incomplete, but real enough to guide him.

  As he listened, he quickly got overwhelmed with his new perception. Unlike his sight, he could essentially see 360 degrees around him. His human mind took a bit to adjust but thankfully, it seemed mimics normally perceived things this way so he quickly got over it.

  ‘Okay, this is a good start. But what now?’

  His first instinct was to move—to get away from the looming shapes in the distance. But another part of him, a part honed by years of climbing and leaping and testing his limits, told him to wait. To hold still, let the sounds map out his surroundings further, take in every detail he could. If he could learn the rough layout of this place, maybe—just maybe—he’d have a chance to avoid whatever danger awaited.

  The sounds grew even clearer, each scrape and growl etching a slightly better picture. He felt the distance between himself and the creatures, felt the slow, predatory way they moved. His mind processed their movement, every step they took sending a pulse of information through his awareness. The creatures were closing in, but he was learning too, his new awareness gradually giving him an edge.

  'Let my instincts guide me, huh?'

  He thought, tightening his focus. He could do this. His body was different, but his instincts, his resolve—that part of him was still Lucas. And with this strange new skill, he was more prepared than he’d thought.