The risen mass of gelatin gathered itself before Justin while he quickly thought.

  Looking at it now, its features clearly weren’t exactly as his guildmate’s had been. The absence of most defining facial features gave it an inhuman uncanniness. It bore an unformed split where a mouth should have been, webbing between its fingers, and a hunched stance. But the overall resemblance was close enough to be suspicious.

  Like two predators had suddenly come up on each other in the wild, they both stood there in silence while observing the other for their next move.

  With taut muscles they were poised to move.

  ‘It's not actually him though, right? How could Heinrich have anything to do with this place?’

  Justin’s first thought was that he had somehow been poisoned or that he was under the effects of a powerful hallucinogen. But that didn’t make sense for a couple of reasons.

  One was that it seemed unlikely that a drug powerful enough to affect a daemon in the middle of the E-Grade could wind up on a primitive planet. It wasn’t as if something that like was rare or particularly expensive on the galactic scale, but contact with primitives was supposed to be nonexistent for higher civilizations unless there was a threat. That’s why their guild had been there, but nothing else was mentioned in the planet’s historical file.

  The second reason was that Justin had an inkling that the racial attributes of scourges made them resistant to psychotropics on the same level as them. Among a race geared to make the most of their minds, it wouldn’t make sense to be easily swayed by those kinds of things.

  So if that wasn’t the case, then the creature he was seeing before him was real.

  So then why did it wear the face of a dead man?

  What had been in that canister?

  Justin wanted to avoid jumping to absurd conclusions in his head. But deeply entrenched by the raw shock value of it all, he nearly couldn’t help it. Resurrecting people from the dead in goo-form? Justin didn’t believe the Council could even do something like that, and they had the wealth and technology of a star cluster!

  Justin was close to reaching a conclusion in his head, but before that could happen the creature had reached the limits of its patience.

  Appearing hesitant to spend more time with the imposing being in front of it, it took off while Justin was distracted. Springing off from their shared platform, it leapt out into the air above the water and dove in.

  “Shit!”

  Justin twisted his neck as he broke from his thoughts. Diving into the water after it, he was quickly faced with the reality that the form of the liquid-like creature was far more suited to water maneuvers than himself.

  It pulled ahead from his pursuit in a flash, diving around a corner into the second cave in the caverns.

  ‘Whatever this thing is, it's fast!’

  Justin pulled himself through the crack between the rocks, before looking around the cave. He caught sight of it at one the walls, trying to wedge itself into the cracks among the rocks.

  Was it attempting to hide?

  ‘Or is it trying to escape?’

  He wouldn’t allow that. Whatever it was, he was determined to make it useful to him.

  Years of gaining levels by trodding over the lives of others had long put away any doubts he had about such a philosophy. He couldn’t let the creature escape the caves. At least not before Justin did.

  Justin burst through the water over to the faux-Heinrich. In a fluid motion he swiped a trio of tentacles that cut easily through its shimmering body.

  [Health: 13 / 15]

  FWSSSHHHH

  Justin immediately felt pain as three of his tentacles were engulfed in the acidity of its body, but the effects of scattering its form were much more devastating for the creature than they were for him.

  Through the water a sharp hiss was carried to his ears. Not just from the evaporation of his own cells, but from the clenched teeth of the creature.

  ‘Oh, you don’t like that, do you?’

  He was more than happy to trade blows with the fluid creature, especially since it looked nearly half-dead after a single attack. This must have been the sense of superiority that the starfish felt, he thought.

  But that didn’t come to pass, as instead of lashing back defensively like Justin had assumed it would, the gel reformed itself with noticeably lesser mass, and bolted out from the rock face.

  ‘It’s already recovered from that?!’

  It shot through the water faster than Justin could turn, heading straight for the exit to the deeper levels.

  How did it know exactly where to go?

  Justin couldn’t answer that, but if it continued at this pace then it might soon come face to face with the starfish.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  What would happen if that came to pass was entirely unpredictable, though Justin knew he needed to stop their meeting with the protector beast no matter what.

  Most of all, he couldn’t allow this confrontation to damage the vault below the cenote. He still didn’t know the value of its contents, but if the other canisters held similar creatures then everything could be in question.

  Justin emerged in the next set of caves, looking around again as he had done before.

  When he didn’t immediately see the glowing flesh of the gelatin he was confused for a second, before a scorching appendage lashed him across his back, nearly slicing through the base of one of his tentacles.

  FWSSSSHHHHH

  [Health: 11 / 15]

  ‘AH!’

  Justin immediately turned, recognizing the now smaller form of the Heinrich doppelganger since he had scattered it.

  Yet it was different now, sporting tentacles from its sides that were…almost similar to his own.

  It lunged at him again, this time directing its tentacles forward in a swipe that was very similar to the way in which Justin had injured it.

  He was barely able to move out of the way in time.

  ‘It copied me? No. This is deception. An ambush.’

  Justin recognized those for what they were: traits of complex intelligence.

  ‘It’s learning from me. Adapting. Its body allows it the opportunity to tailor its attacks to an opponent, and it's using that to form a method of countering me.’

  Justin’s eyes widened. He backed up through the water as the creature poised itself again.

  Only now did Justin realize the depth of what he was facing.

  He had been wrong.

  The vial hadn’t contained some kind of poison, or a hallucinogen, but something more akin to a biological weapon. Probably extremely experimental, as from the seal it was clearly deemed volatile even by the creators of it.

  For good reason, too.

  Highly regenerative, intelligent, extremely adaptable, and in a form that was inherently mobile.

  Attributes which would have made it the perfect weapon, were it not for its fragility.

  Yet it had literally been only minutes since it had been released from its container, and it was already threatening Justin who had experienced an evolution.

  Evolution was something that should have set him apart from this planet’s natural order, yet his opponent’s strength had grown to nearly on-par within minutes.

  If it hadn’t been for its fragility, perhaps it might’ve been more inclined to confront him openly. But even that was quickly changing…

  Justin cursed as he caught sight of the creature’s exterior growing dimmer. Its luminescence wasn’t decreasing from energy loss, but rather its exterior was condensing a layer of durable scales.

  The same adaptability that had grown its tentacles was now armoring it.

  ‘I have to kill it right now! Fuck its usefulness–this thing could gain the upper hand if I give it a moment longer!’

  As he should have done from the beginning, Justin approached it fully with the intent to kill, swiping full-strength at the creature with no heed to his own defenses.

  But with the same number of tentacles, it was all too quick to parry him.

  The defensive technique’s strength was then only multiplied by the acidity of its body which instantly broke down the flesh of Justin it touched.

  [Health: 9 / 15]

  Justin groaned.

  After parrying his movement with a graceful redirection, it twisted back on him, curling around his outstretched limbs and chopping down.

  One of his appendages was cleanly severed, forcing him to reel back while leaving his body open.

  [Health: 7 / 15]

  “Gah!”

  Justin inadvertently swallowed some water. The creature then looked from him to his severed appendage that was now writhing through the water, before making a decision to lunge for it.

  ‘It’s going for it? Now's my chance!’

  Justin whip-cracked his remaining tentacles forward at the back of Heinrich, who was midway through absorbing his fallen limb. With a shockwave, Justin’s tentacles scattered a mass of gelatin and sent the creature back against the salt rock wall.

  Its still-forming armor shattered in reactive waves and left it impaled by the sharp salt.

  Justin came up in front of it, with his tentacles fanned out, surrounding it with the intent to strike. Still, the machinations of the creature’s body couldn’t be halted by mere injury.

  ‘Even now, it's continuing to adapt.’

  He almost couldn’t believe that such an organism could exist. Justin had never seen a similar ability, on any planet he had ever been to. Lemus, for all of its primitivisms, continually surprised him.

  Perhaps it was the mutant beast population of the planet and not the native population that served as the true value of the planet?

  Justin moved closer to close in on the creature, when all of a sudden its unformed mouth opened up and the face of Heinrich mouthed something through the water.

  Justin’s face scrunched. Though the vibrations passed over to him, he couldn’t make them out.

  But it wouldn’t matter anyway. Although the gelatin having the capacity for speech might have been surprising at first, if he considered the choices it had made and the offensive it had mounted, it was clearly smarter than the starfish was.

  He would have been tempted to try to assimilate, were it not for the fear of it adapting even to that.

  Regardless, it was thoroughly beaten by this point, so anything it could be saying now could only be a plea for mercy. Even if it spoke in a language that Justin knew, he could only meet such a plea with denial, given his situation.

  But then the unexpected happened, and a voice actually did reach Justin’s ears.

  No, not his ears. It reverberated within his mind.

  “Fear! Servility!”

  ‘No way…’

  Upon hearing the familiar manner of speech, Justin nearly tripped over himself. Luckily, he was underwater at the moment so such a thing was impossible.

  ‘It’s psychic? Just like the starfish?’

  Justin felt a sense of shock overcome him. What were the odds of that? A dreadful thought then entered his mind, as he realized there was an implication here.

  ‘Like the starfish, it's a psychic. It's odd, even worrying, but I have to wonder if the others in the vials are like this too?’

  And if that was the case, could it also be true for every mutant beast?

  Was it possible that every creature on Lemus IV was psychic? In that case, weren’t they all a half-step away from being exposed to the system?