Chapter 4: Lord Have Mercy, It’s an Elf
[System: Bloody hell, you are impatient. Look at your stats, you absolute potato. You gained five Indulgence points from that cockroach, and you spent them as a drunken sailor on that speed burst. Your actual Evolution Bar needs five thousand points to even hit E-Rank. You are a long, long way off from getting to a frozen choice menu. Right now, you’re not even a threat. You’re a footnote in a biology textbook.]
My grand illusions of immediate dominance deflate instantly. I look at my pencil-thin body, then down toward the empty tunnel outside my crack.
Five thousand?
So it’s basically just like my old corporate job. Endless grinding, terrible management, and my only reward for hard work is a tiny metric telling me I have to do it all over again tomorrow.
[System: Welcome to the grind, Matt. If you slither outside this crevice right now, a stray sewer rat will mistake you for a random piece of spaghetti and delete you from the underworld. So pipe down.]
Probably. It’s hard to tell time when your only calendar is a rusted Medons sign and a profound sense of existential dread.
Waking up as a snake is a weirdly binary experience. There is no cozy, slow transition where you lie in bed scrolling through your phone for half an hour, regretting your life choices. You are either a frozen stick of red plastic, or your eyeballs flash open, and your brain is instantly running at 100% capacity on pure, cold-blooded paranoia.
The thermal radar at the back of my neck boots up like a laggy old desktop monitor, flickering from cold blue to a muddy green. The massive, terrifying heat signature from yesterday is entirely gone. The coast is clear.
Even better, the severe hunger pangs from yesterday had completely vanished. My cracked snake metabolism had dissolved the lingering energy down into pure, unadulterated stamina. I stretched my spine, rippling my small frame against the grimy concrete. I felt dense. I felt solid. I still looked like a discarded shoelace, but I was officially a premium shoelace.
[System: Oh, look who’s awake. Rise and shine, sleeping beauty. I was almost tempted to draw a dick on your head with a Sharpie while you were out. How are you feeling? No lingering regrets about not eating?]
I feel fantastic, actually.
I projected back, testing my new body.
I moved forward, and instead of rolling around like a rogue log of cookie dough, my 400 micro-muscles coordinated beautifully. I executed a sharp, elegant S-curve around a rusted nail. Look at that. I’m basically a professional.
Give me my props, system. I survived the night without resorting to cannibalism or bug-munching.
[System: Yeah, real majestic, mate. You’re moving at a staggering speed of roughly two kilometres per hour. Watch out, world, the red flash is here. Since you’re feeling cocky, do you want to actually do something with 1 Indulgence Point I can give you as a bonus? It’s sitting in your bank now, or are you just gonna huff dust under this counter forever?]
I hesitate; my hunger, though suppressed by the system’s "stamina" bullshit, was still a dull ache in my belly. But I look at the floor where the roach had died. It was just an empty, greasy stain now. I hadn’t eaten it. I hadn’t eaten anything.
I’m not eating the bug, System. I don’t care how much you taunt me. I have standards. I was an accountant, I think, and I don’t want to devolve into a scavenger who eats things that live in public toilets.
[System: You’re a snake, you delusional muppet. And for the record, you didn’t eat the roach because of standards. You didn’t eat it because you’re a squeamish, middle-class soft-cock. Big difference.]
Whatever. Just show me the shop. I want to buy a skill that isn’t running away like a bitch.
[System: Oh, that’s rich. You literally spent your points to sprint away at 300% speed, and now you’re complaining about the ’bitch’ aspect? Fine. Let’s see what we can do for the pampered little toothbrush.]
Alright, let’s see the shop.
Pulling myself up into a slightly more dignified coil.
What kind of broken, overpowered abilities can an F-Rank baby parrot snake buy for one whole point? Give me something that lets me shoot lasers out of my eyes. Or at least something that gives me thumbs. A man needs thumbs.
Ding.
The vibrant blue text interface snaps into view, obscuring my vision.
[INDULGENCE SHOP - F-RANK UTILITIES]
Available Balance: 1 IP
Purchasable Skills:
[Aggressive Tongue Flicking (Rank G] — Cost: 1 IP. Wiggle your tongue at things. Smell slightly better. Insects may or may not care. +5% scent accuracy, which, on a scale of zero to useful, is a zero.
[Play Dead (Rank F] — Cost: 1 IP. Instantly go limp, exuding a faint aroma of mild disappointment. 40% chance a predator thinks you’re too pathetic to eat; 60% chance they eat you anyway because a free snack is a free snack.
[Thermal Camouflage (Rank F)] — Cost: 1 IP. Temporarily dampens your biological heat signature, matching your core temperature to the surrounding stone for 60 seconds.
Cooldown: 5 minutes. I stare flatly at the digital options.
Play Dead? Seriously? The description literally says I exude the aroma of mild disappointment. I did that for thirty-five years in London for a corporate salary; I’m not paying a penny to do it for free in a sewer.
[System: Hey, don’t knock the classics. The corporate boardroom roleplay hentai you like practically functions on the same defensive mechanics. But if you want my professional advice as your supervisor? Take the thermal camo. Down here, everything hunts by heat. If you look like a hot chip crawling down the main area, you’re done for.]
I glance past the edge of my collapsed market stall, out into the velvet gloom of the dead city street. Across the lane, the crooked neon Pear logo blinks weakly, a sole monument of a dead era. The system isn’t wrong. If a smartphone-sized roach almost took me out, whatever else is lurking near that ruined Maccas sign is going to be significantly worse.
Fine, whatever. Purchase Thermal Camouflage.
[System: Done. 1 IP deducted. Try not to use it all in one place, ya shithead. Also, what will you delete for it? As you didn’t tell me, I’m going with [Hiss]. ]
A strange, numbing sensation washes over my scales. It feels like someone poured a glass of ice water directly down my spine, my core temperature instantly dropping until I perfectly blend into the freezing stone beneath my belly. On my own mental radar, my bright red dot fades into a dull, camouflaged blue-white mist.
[New Skill Unlocked: Thermal Camouflage (Rank F]
Ok, decide for me, perfect, whatever. Now I’m a stealth red pipe cleaner, a smirk rippling through my scales. Time to get out of this shit hole. Let’s see what the rest of this neighbourhood looks like.
I slither out from beneath the rusted iron bracket, leaving my safe little crevice behind. The air of the underworld hits my face, thick with the scent of ancient dust, damp masonry, and a faint, distant whiff of something that smells suspiciously like stale coffee and burnt sugar.
I keep close to the shadows of the collapsed counters, my silver eyes scanning the environment. Up ahead, the cracked asphalt of the subterranean street opens up into a larger intersection.
Suddenly, my tongue flicks out.
Flick. Flick.
The air tastes like... static?
[System: Oi. Stop sniffing the air. We’ve got incoming, but it’s not a sewer dog this time.]
I froze, my tiny red chin pressing flat against the freezing concrete.
What do you mean incoming?! My eyes dart across the dark intersection.
Give me a map scan! Is it another twelve-legged demon hound? Because honestly, I’ve got a two-kilometre-per-hour top speed and a brand-new skill, and I’m feeling kind of dangerous.
[System: First of all, stop calling me ’System,’ you fucker. I’m a real live... well, I was alive. Am I a real god? Hah, nice. Yeah, let’s go with that. Sounds majestic. Anyway, call me something else. Call me daddy, you would like that you sick fuck.]
Before I could process the pure brain damage of that response, a scent particle registered on the roof of my mouth. It was sweet. Pungent. It tasted like rotting fruit, heavily mixed with a strange, pulsing evolutionary energy.
I crept forward, peering around the base of a shattered concrete pillar. There, sitting right in the middle of the ruined lane directly underneath a faded billboard, was a glowing, translucent purple RGB mushroom. It was growing out of a crack in the pavement, radiating a soft, rhythmic amethyst light that beautifully illuminated the dust specks dancing around it.
It looked magical. It looked rare. It looked like it was worth a ton of experience points.
It also looked like absolute, textbook bait.
[System: Oh ho. Look what we have here. A Midnight Shroom. Highly toxic to humans, but for a premium, exotic little snake like you? That’s pure evolution fuel, mate. It’s practically screaming your name.]
Yeah, it’s also sitting completely exposed in the dead centre of the street.
Yeah, no. I didn’t survive this long by slithering straight at the glowing thing. There’s got to be a catch.
I activated my heat radar, scanning the shadows surrounding the glowing mushroom. Nothing. The stone walls were cold. The debris was dead.
But just as I prepared to take a tentative slither forward, my eyes adjusted to the dim light above the mushroom. Tucked upside down against the rusted scaffolding of a collapsed store awning was a creature.
My silver slit eyes widened, and my glitched-out human brain instantly halted.
It was an elf. Or well, a dark elf, judging by the shade of her skin. She was crouched on the rusted beams like a feline predator, wearing a set of incredibly tight, tattered leather clothes, a crop and some shorts that left very little to the imagination. I mean, the laws of physics were practically putting in overtime just holding those leather straps together.
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