NOVEL NEXT Chapter 27: Freaking Out
Padding towards the revealed pillar with eagerness running through him, it was only when he reached the altar itself that he realised he was leaving a bloody trail of footprints behind him. Suddenly his skin seemed to itch terribly, like there were ants running all over him.
I’ve got to clean myself up, he decided. Opening his status screen, he would have crossed his fingers if he’d still had them. All in the hope that the meerkat massacre would have earned him the Prey Points to level up.
A forlorn hope as it turned out.
Progress to Evolution: 165/178 PP level up
All those damn level 0 rats, Dominic thought grumpily as he dismissed his status screen. At least I’m not hungry or thirsty after all that.
Hunger level: 95%
Thirst level: 99%
He’d also barely lost any stamina or health over the whole fight. Or rather, he’d lost them, but consuming the bodies had replenished practically all of what he’d lost. He was down to 210 HP and 74 SP, but his stamina at least would come back after some rest. As for his HP, he just needed to get another 13 Prey Points and he’d be golden.
Dominic didn’t want to get bloody paw prints all over his loot though. With no chance of levelling up right away or shower available, he was going to have to clean up the old-fashioned way. Licking himself.
Raising his paw to his mouth, Dominic tried not to think too hard about it. Just like licking my fingers after eating pizza or something. This was the first time he’d ever have to give himself a tongue bath, but he’d cleaned his hands with his tongue a number of times when there was no serviette available.
His body knew what to do, though, moving on automatic as he let sense-memory take over. His tongue licked at his furry ‘hand’, extending further than he was used to and curling into the space between his toes.
The bristles on his tongue combed through his fur, and the sensation was surprisingly...pleasant. Maybe it was because this body was familiar with cleaning itself after a good meal, or its mother cleaning it, but as he licked at his paws, he felt a warm sense of safety come over him. Almost like he was a child cuddling his favourite comforter.
It was only his human mind which had any objections to basically licking the same paw he had been using to massacre both meerkats and trodils, as well as walking all over the floor of the temple and the earth outside. And he was suddenly coming to understand that his human mind had less of an impact than he’d thought.
Rote actions, muscle memory, those were things he was familiar with. He was unsurprised when, after the initial period of adjustment, he’d been able to settle into the movements this body was used to with little difficulty. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the neural development of the lion’s brain, the physical expression of his thoughts, were having just as much impact.
I’ve barely thought of my dad, Dominic realised with a sudden pang of longing. His dad who had supported him after his mum had left, who had always been patient and loving. His dad who hadn’t been satisfied with him being a mere café worker, but had accepted it if that was what he’d wanted. His dad who had helped him pay for the flights for this trip because he’d hoped that it would help Dominic to ‘find himself’. His dad who would be wondering what the hell had happened to him.
How haven’t I thought about him? But he thought he knew the answer. The lion wasn’t used to thinking about parents. Wasn’t used to missing them. And so without Dominic actively trying to think about his dad...he didn’t. And what about this whole situation?
Now he’d started thinking about what he hadn’t been thinking about, he realised that he was far more freaked out by the situation than he had thought. Or not thought, was more to the point. I’m suddenly a lion. I’m not...I’m not human any more.
It felt like Leo was once more tearing at his gut, the pain that flashed through him at the thought. The lion’s brain was used to dealing purely with the present, so that was exactly what he’d ended up doing. But that meant he hadn’t dealt with...any of this.
Dominic realised that he’d frozen, his tongue halfway through licking his paw. He resumed the motion, needing the sense of comfort that came with it, regardless of the stimulus. The wave of safety that flowed over him like a warm blanket helped to curb the panic that threatened to drown him.
The world I know has...gone, he forced himself to admit, screwing his eyes shut and letting the soothing movements of cleaning happen by muscle memory. There was some sort of apocalypse. I was forced into the body of a lion. Anger rose inside him as he forced himself to remember that moment. Anger at Leo for causing it to happen by attacking him in the first place. Then a thought occurred.
And Leo was forced to become a passenger in his own body, Dominic finished, the anger vanishing to be replaced by a little sympathy and sorrow for the lion who had, in the end, only been acting as lions do. Though the fact that Leo had been eating him at the time of the arrival of the System was probably the reason for them being combined, the human in the equation was also at fault.
After all, if Dominic had stayed in his broken-down car instead of going against all advice and getting out in a game reserve, he wouldn’t have been attacked by Leo. And if the System hadn’t arrived when it did, Dominic would have simply died. So it wasn’t any more Leo’s fault than it was Dominic’s.
What happened to the rest of the world? the human-trapped-inside-a-lion asked himself. I haven’t seen any evidence of humans yet, but surely they were brought over just as I was? Because it truly was ‘they’ now. Not ‘we’. He wasn’t human any more. But it wasn’t until the System started trying to reconstitute me that it ran into the error, so that must mean that, if it had arrived a few minutes earlier, it would have, uh, reconstituted me next to the lion, instead of having to combine us. So presumably that meant humans were on the same planet.
So my dad could still be alive. It was a nice thought, imagining that humanity hadn’t been really affected by this change. Dominic allowed himself to indulge in that dream for a moment, imagining his father going to work as usual, driving into London on his two-hour commute, working in his office job as an investment fund manager, then returning home to his empty house, wondering where his only son was.
It was a little painful to consider, but much less painful than thinking about the end-of-days scenario inspired by so many of the System Apocalypse stories he’d read. Imagining alien monsters running down the streets or swooping in from the skies to pick off vulnerable humans. Or the criminal elements of society quickly rising to the top due to earning Prey Points or XP or whatever humans earn and creating gang-ruled cities.
When Dominic’s imagination started venturing into scenarios where his father’s house was broken into by monsters – human or otherwise – and his dad was killed for the little benefit his body could bring, he forced himself to focus on the present.
Maybe the lion brain had it right, he thought grimly. How is worrying about this helping me? It wasn’t, was the answer. Realising that he’d fully cleaned one of his forepaws while he’d been lost in his head, he switched over to the other, falling back into his thoughts.
He’d been doing fine before he tried to think about the past or future. He’d been coping with his new body, levelling up at what he thought had to be a decent speed, and sort of enjoying exploring the dungeon. At least, he’d been enjoying earning loot. What was the benefit to thinking about his father who was probably at least twelve thousand kilometres away from him?
If his father was fine, that was great. If he wasn’t, what could Dominic do about it? Even if planes and cars still existed – and there was no guarantee of that – as a lion, he couldn’t exactly rock up to the local airport and buy a ticket.
Despite himself, a wave of amusement went through him as he imagined the reactions to a large predator casually walking in through the sliding doors of an airport, padding over to the ticket desk and attempting to communicate in growls with the attendant. Actually, security probably wouldn’t let me get in that far, he mused. The image of a lion driving a rental was even more amusing.
So no, any attempt to get back to his father would require him to travel by foot across the whole length of Africa, swim across the Mediterranean – or take the long way around – and then walk through two European countries before swimming across the Channel. And that was even assuming that the countries of the world still looked the way they had before the apocalypse, which Dominic doubted based on what that System message had said about combining three other worlds with Earth. In short, it was a long-shot. He might as well sprout wings and just fly there.
Better for Dominic to find a way of regaining his human form so that he could take advantage of any transportation options humanity had available to them. Then he could find out what had happened to his father. Hopefully that would mean actually finding his father, but Dominic was aware of the possibility that he might not have quite such a happy ending to his search.
It was strange to realise that he was infinitely more concerned about his dad than he was about the fact that he was now stuck in a significantly different body from his previous. But I suppose that’s natural. While I miss elements of my human body, there’s no denying the fact that this one is far superior to my human one. Physically anyway. And if he could succeed in getting a human or humanoid form, he would have all the benefits of both bodies.
So perhaps it was natural not to be so upset about his involuntary body transference. Certainly, considering the alternative was for him to be dead, he was in favour of the option that left him alive. If he’d been given the choice by the System between those two possibilities, he would have chosen exactly what had actually happened.
And honestly, in some ways he’d got a better deal than Leo – he couldn’t imagine what it was like to have someone else take control over his body and just have to be a helpless bystander. An unwelcome sense of sympathy ran through him for the leonine presence which remained at the edge of his mind.
Pulling himself out of his thoughts this time was easier. He was feeling calmer, more at peace. It was probably a mixture of the pleasant sensations of the grooming, and actually working through emotions which he hadn’t been considering but which had been there in the background. Either way, realising that he was missing and worrying about his dad, but that he wasn’t going to be able to do anything anytime soon was cathartic.
Turning his attention to his paws, he pushed the last human sense of ‘ick’ to the side, and focused on getting the second one as clean as possible. Once he was sure that he wasn’t going to be getting bloody pawprints all over his loot, he reared up to lean on the edge of the pillar.
As in the previous room, there was a small wooden chest inside. With the same motions that worked last time, Dominic opened up the box.