Kamcy

  I walked up to the cave entrance and lowered myself onto the cold stone, letting out a deep, shuddering exhale.

  Behind me y the monster.

  Seven spikes pinned it to the cave floor—some carved from bone, others torn straight from my statue-like corpses and sharpened by repeated use. They jutted out of its flesh at ugly angles, impaling its torso, abdomen, and limbs. Blood had soaked into the stone beneath it over the past few days, dark yers of dried crimson beneath fresher pools that still glistened wetly in the dim light.

  For three days straight, I'd been experimenting with the creature.

  And in that time, I'd come to a few unavoidable conclusions.

  First.

  The creature was literally unkilble.

  It didn't matter how many times I stabbed it. Where I stabbed it. How violently I killed it. Whether I crushed its skull, disemboweled it, or reduced it to a twitching ruin of flesh and bone.

  I even beat it helpless once.

  Broke all its limbs—one by one—listening to bones snap and tear through meat while it shrieked and convulsed on the ground. After that, I dragged its ruined body to the water that had pooled outside the cave from the endless rain, shoved it face-down, and held it there.

  I drowned it.

  Held it under until the struggling stopped, until bubbles no longer rose from its mouth, until its body went limp in my hands.

  It didn't matter.

  It came back.

  Flesh crawled over bone. Limbs reformed. Its lungs filled again, its chest heaving as it resurrected right in front of me, like death itself was nothing more than an inconvenience.

  That's when I assumed the problem wasn't killing it—but stopping its chance for regeneration.

  From my previous observations, the creature had always absorbed my energy every time I fought it, refined it, and used it to heal. So I tried to exhaust it instead, pouring everything I had into repeated attacks, hoping to drain whatever reserve it relied on.

  That failed too.

  Its body naturally absorbed ambient energy from the environment. It was a slow procedure, sure—painfully slow compared to feeding on me—but enough. Even when not given access to energy close to what it gained from me, it was still enough to prevent permanent death.

  Next, I tried ripping out the parasite fused to its back.

  I tore it free once, flesh peeling apart under my hands.

  It regenerated like everything else.

  So I gave up on killing it.

  And moved on to the second thing I found out.

  The energy wasn't exclusive.

  It was everywhere.

  It took time, trial, and more than a few deaths from the monster, but I eventually figured out how to absorb it from the environment by watching it do so. Not cleanly. Not efficiently like the creature did. But enough to feel my reserves grow.

  Trying to refine it into an orb like the creature did, on the other hand, was a whole different nightmare.

  After a few failed attempts, I realized brute-forcing it wouldn't work. So I went out and caught animals from the surrounding forest—I didn't stray too far from the cave, though. I didn't want the creature escaping, as it had attempted to do so multiple times.

  That was another thing I learned: the creature could feel fear.

  It was intelligent enough to run.

  So rather than kill it outright, I'd kill it briefly, rush out, capture something, and drag it back before it could regenerate enough to flee.

  The next thing I found out was that everything had a trace of energy in it, though some more than others. For example, animals carried more than pnts, and pnts more than inanimate objects or the environment. So when I captured animals, I brought them back alive when I could, watching the creature absorb them and refine the energy into that dense sphere in its navel.

  I had tried to replicate the same process, but maybe it was biology. Maybe something else. It didn't particurly work how I wanted.

  I kept trying anyway.

  Then, a few days back, I ran into a problem with my experiments.

  I didn't have food.

  The animals I caught were either turned to stone or were straight-up inedible, as I couldn't eat them raw. Finding fruits wasn't easy either, since I couldn't spend too long outside. Endless rain meant wet wood, useless for fire.

  So I found another loophole.

  I killed myself.

  Respawned.

  No longer hungry.

  It wasn't good for my mental health, but I needed to understand this energy if I wanted to survive, so I bore with it.

  I still couldn't refine my energy the way the creature did.

  But I had learned a few other applications.

  I learned how to mask my presence—it worked really well for hunting when I approached animals from behind, even while standing right next to them, so long as I didn't make noise.

  By aligning my energy frequency with the environment, I became indistinguishable from the world itself. Not invisible—just very hard to sense, even with normal senses, at least based on my experience capturing animals.

  Then came imbuement.

  Crude. Wobbly. But effective.

  Aside from strengthening my body, I could strengthen the spikes I used in combat, make them harder, sharper, more durable. Still, I couldn't move energy far from my body.

  And then there were my senses.

  They sharpened beyond anything human.

  I could read the creature's energy and predict its movements. Hear better. Smell better. Even see in near darkness.

  Which made me wonder how the creature's… well, brother could be blind during the day.

  Then I realized—maybe it cked the intelligence to apply energy creatively. Its use was instinctual. Primitive.

  Hearing it stir, I turned.

  It looked pathetic.

  Pinned. Scarred. Half-healed. Like a dog beaten too often by an owner that hated it.

  I almost ughed.

  I had been abusing it. Physically. Repeatedly. Venting my anger.

  Honestly, I would've let it go days ago.

  If not for unfinished business.

  "Well, back to work we go," I said, standing as I grabbed the small squirrel I'd tied nearby with vines.

  The creature tore the spikes from its body, blood spilling fresh as it turned to face me—and froze.

  It couldn't sense me.

  All it felt was the squirrel.

  Desperation took over.

  It grabbed the animal and absorbed it greedily, like a man dying of thirst gulping water.

  I focused energy into my eyes, opening my senses fully, watching the refinement process unfold—compression, rotation, stabilization.

  I nodded.

  Grabbing my spikes, I fred my energy just enough for the creature to shriek and recoil instead of attacking.

  "It seems you have memorized my energy signature. I'm surprised at how intelligent you guys are. Are you sure you can't talk, or are you just pretending otherwise?"

  It shrieked again, stunning me—and ran.

  HAHAHAHAHA!

  The ughter tore out of me, manic and raw, as I chased it down.

  I caught up just as it reached the cave entrance, leapt over it, and drove a spike straight through its upper spine.

  Paralysis was instant.

  "Sorry, pal. I'm not done with you yet."

  I reinforced my hand with energy and punched.

  Its head exploded.

  Not cracked. Not crushed.

  It burst—flesh, skull fragments, and liquefied brain matter spraying outward in a wet, concussive bloom. Blood painted the cave wall as the body colpsed mid-shriek.

  I shook the blood from my hand and washed it off in the pool at the entrance.

  Then I noticed something.

  "Huh. The rain is finally coming to an end."

  The downpour thinned. Clouds began to break.

  I dragged the regenerating body back inside and returned to the entrance, sitting down again.

  Then I tried what I had observed.

  I gathered the energy from my limbs, organs, all over my being—compressing it inward, mimicking the creature's process.

  At first, nothing.

  Then resistance.

  The energy slipped, burned, tore at my nerves. I failed. Tried again. And still failed—but didn't relent.

  Then something opened.

  It felt like a gate unlocking inside me.

  The energy was inside my body—but also elsewhere. Somewhere vast. Somewhere ethereal. I had never gone through a portal, but it felt like this energy opened a gate located an infinite distance away, yet still somehow inside me. I had a feeling like I was glimpsing a truth of the universe. It made me wonder if I was high or something. I'd never tried drugs, but I had read about and heard my friends' descriptions of it.

  And then it spiraled.

  The energy began spinning, pulling inward, absorbing everything—my reserves and even the energy from the surroundings.

  I lost control.

  My stomach twisted.

  Slowly.

  Then violently.

  The spin accelerated until it felt like a bck hole forming inside me.

  My body colpsed inward.

  Skin tore. Organs liquefied. Blood and gore sprayed outward as I imploded, leaving nothing behind but a ruin of flesh as I saw bck.

  I woke up again with a severe headache.

  "Well, that's a new sensation," I muttered as I rubbed the side of my head.

  Turning my head, I found something that made the side of my mouth twitch.

  The creature was gone.

  Probably escaped during my respawn.

  The rain had stopped entirely too.

  "Well, whatever," I muttered, sitting down once more.

  I closed my eyes.

  And tried again.