“Professor, the biopsy results have come back.”

  “Hm? Oh…good. Let’s see them.”

  A few hours after arriving, the preliminary teams onboard the first airship had determined the encampment to be free of any airborne pathogens or radioactivity.

  So while the rest of the airships had descended at the news and begun to unload the supplies for the resettlement of the area, most of the scientists and government officials in the camp had chosen to remove their hazard suits for comfort’s sake.

  Odette was one of the few exceptions to this, refusing to take off the protective equipment as there was still a possibility the teams had missed something, as she had stated. This was even after being asked multiple times by Caleb to follow suit.

  So to reward the researcher for being so ‘well equipped’, Caleb had appointed her to the monotonous task of watching the progress of the core sample analyzers tick up while the rest of them had fallen back to the ship for lunch.

  The cafe tent didn't have the capacity for hot food yet, and it would be a time still before anywhere had more amenities than the ships. So after a long while, Odette had finally left the tent station to call for the Senior Researcher’s presence.

  Caleb took his time finishing his meal before throwing the remainder in the trash.

  With the unhurried movement one would expect from someone twenty years older, he followed behind the junior researcher as she explained the results of the scans.

  “Hmm, nothing unusually for the most part, though a lot of these can’t be traced to any known samples of the Republic.”

  Caleb bent over the device’s monitor, nodding his head. There was a slightly annoying buzzing noise from all of the devices in the tent.

  “Would that suggest it’s extra—”

  “--No. Mutant samples with unique gene structures come up all the time in our database, it's one of their commonalities, if nothing else. These results suggest nothing more than the fact we’ve uncovered yet another species of mutant beast, and it’ll be reported as such.”

  But even then, mutant samples usually had some identifiable similarity in their genetic structure with a non-mutated organism.

  They were called mutants, after all, but what Odette had been about to say next was stuffed back down as soon as she saw the look on Caleb’s face. He obviously didn’t want to continue to hear what he viewed as unscientific drivel.

  As a result, Odette instead nodded and deferred to the judgement of the more senior official. Moving on, she then addressed the next monitor.

  “This is the result that I felt most merited your attention, however. As you can see, while a core sample from the brain doesn’t show as much as a full scan would, the system still picked up its abnormalities shortly after the sampling.”

  Odette reversed the diagram on the computer back to the view of it when the sample had been taken.

  “As you can see…”

  “My god!”

  Caleb stood back like he had just discovered fire.

  His attention was caught by the minute flashes of light that were shown on the screen’s imagery of the brain, signals that were only supposed to be present in a living sample, not in one like they had taken.

  “Bio-electric signals! I can’t believe it.”

  “Actually, sir, I was thinking that perhaps the signals were rendered from a less distilled presence of energy. I know our sampling machine only goes through a certain database of emissions so I was wondering if…”

  “Odette, please. Now is not the time to stand out, like I’ve said. This software is clearly identifying bio-electric signals, and I can verify it as such given my expertise. You’ve spoken at length regarding your ambitions, but now isn’t the time to go overboard. Go inform the Major to contact the department. We’ll be needing more personnel to investigate this.”

  What? She could hardly believe his words.

  At that moment, Caleb seemed like a completely different person than the one who had been on the airship, listening to her anxieties.

  Had she offended him when she spoke of her career aspirations?

  For all her expertise in a lab, the human element still eluded her. These last few interactions with the senior she thought she had known baffled her.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Odette! Go tell Major Smirnov!”

  Caleb looked back from the monitor to Odette. His glare at that moment destroyed any faith she had once had that he was going to be just in his evaluation of her.

  As she now could recognize, her performance on this mission had gone from a certain pass to now hanging in the wind precariously.

  Beneath the fear that she felt though, Odette was shocked to recognize another feeling surfacing. A heat in her chest that she had barely felt since the start of her professional career had begun to bubble to the surface.

  Fury.

  …

  ‘Well, I’m fucked.’

  Justin retracted his tentacles as he tried and failed for the umpteenth time to scale the enormous chasm wall that he was currently below.

  After being drained from the swamp like unmentionables from a toilet, Justin had fallen for hundreds of feet before landing in a deep cavern. Unlike the piles of meat paste around him though, he had tentacles at his disposal to slow his descent.

  The lake’s water was still falling like a cascade into the low space, filling it up and restricting him to an ever-shrinking spot of dry ground.

  With the limited light of the cavern, Justin couldn’t get a good look at his tentacles, but could certainly feel the aftermath of trying to climb up the sheer rock face.

  ‘They feel like they’ve been through a cheese grater.’

  Justin held them before him. Not enjoying the raw feeling, he quickly swept over the smashed corpses of the hive soldiers, consuming their biomass to reform his body.

  Some degree of regeneration happened over time in any body with the system, but he had found out recently that he could expedite it by using biomass as a fuel and material for repair. Adding to the fact that the hive consumed it, Justin was beginning to see why it was first rewarded by the stage quests.

  ‘Still, I hope there’s more uses for it.’

  Justin looked around the cave that was half underwater.

  After being drained from the lake, Justin had taken a few minutes to calm himself before seeing that he had fallen into some kind of salt cave. Countless hexagonal pillars of the mineral lined the walls, some even gave off an illumination bright enough to dimly light the space with a whitish-yellow hue.

  ‘Never seen that before, but I’ve got to deal with one thing at a time.’

  Like getting out of the cave to begin with. Fuck acting like a tourist.

  He could still feel the presence of the rest of the hive, but only distantly now. They had begun to move through the swamp already, likely beginning to search for the other end of the cave.

  They very well couldn’t follow him the way he had come in, after all. But regardless, Justin had no plan to rely on the hive’s help.

  ‘If climbing up isn’t an option, then I’ll have to find an exit somewhere else. Below?’

  Justin scanned the water around the stone island he currently stood on.

  There was something off about the color in some parts of the lake. Justin noticed something on the far end of the cave, where a few bubbles were coming to the surface.

  ‘It's darker over there than the lake’s water. It must have been here long enough to be significantly salinized.’

  Unlike the water from the lake that had just been introduced, that meant it was native to this cave.

  Given its presence local to only that end of the cave, it also indicated there was probably a deeper section over there.

  It was his best bet.

  Though it was possible that the cave system went deeper before emerging somewhere else in the swamp, he still carried the risk of getting stuck there. But he wouldn’t make any progress if he waited here, and if the hive took too long to find him he didn’t know if they would starve or not. It didn’t matter how much biomass he had stored if he couldn’t reach them.

  Justin dived into the water before leaving a few tentacles wrapped around the dry stones.

  Even if he could hold his breath for a few minutes, his body still needed a source of oxygen in case he got trapped.

  ‘It’s getting cooler in this direction, I’ll go deeper.’

  It was surprisingly easy to navigate through the waters with his new form, as thanks to his tentacles he could push and pull through the jagged cave quite easily. Actually seeing what he was doing was still no easy task, however.

  ‘I think there’s a hole here…yep. Oh it's a tight fit!’

  Justin grimaced as he squeezed his body through the underwater crack in the cave floor. Chunks of salt rock flew off, while some pierced through the mushier parts in his prehensile limbs.

  [Health: 14 / 15]

  ‘Oh come on! Are you kidding me?’

  Justin wrestled through it, squeezing through to the next side of the crack and into colder water. Emerging on the other side, he felt a strong tug on one of his tentacles that prevented him from moving deeper.

  It wasn’t long enough. The few tentacles he had left back above the water had reached the end of their slack and refused to stretch any further. This was as far as he could go. Or was it?

  ‘Their basically just like big muscles aren’t they? With what I know about muscles…’

  Justin grabbed the root of the tentacles and bundled them together so he was touching all of them at once, then while pulling back to stretch them out, he suffused units of biomass from his internal storage.

  Like he predicted, the tentacles began to slacken. Without getting any closer to the opening he had come from, he was gaining distance by elongating a part of his own body.

  Justin felt triumphant. He had finally fulfilled the one desire held by every man.

  Like that, Justin continued elongating his oxygen-supplying tentacles behind him as he traveled deeper into the cave system.

  After a few minutes of the cave water temperature continuing to drop, eventually Justin was stopped dead in his tracks.

  Something had changed in the water.

  ‘I’ve only descended so far but the water has started to get warmer?’