Lucien didn't remember when he finally fell asleep inside the cold, silent cave. Exhaustion pulled him under like deep water.
When his eyes eventually opened, the air felt different, the ground different, the lighting wrong.
He pushed himself upright.
He was no longer in a cave.
He stood alone in the centre of a vast arena.
Gone was the rocky darkness and damp earth. Instead he faced an open circular battlefield made of ancient stone, lit by a colourless sky that had no sun yet somehow glowed.
This certainly wasn't how Lucien had pictured the afterlife if he was dead.
He stood in the centre of the arena, staring at something he couldn't fully comprehend.
Whatever this thing was, he had no frame of reference for it... humans from earth would say it was something like a mutated lovechild of a Skinwalker and Slenderman.
When the monstrosity fully extracted itself from the shadows, the utter wrongness of it struck Lucien worst of all.
It looked like evolution had forgotten to finish this thing's face. No mouth, no nose, just a blank canvas of twitching skin where features should have been.
After that moment of frozen disbelief, something else finally pushed through the fear... his own body felt wrong.
At first it was small things, the sort of details the mind tries to ignore.
His tongue brushed against his upper lip and he flinched.
The sharp points pressing there weren't normal teeth. They were longer, heavier, as if they didn't belong to the mouth he remembered.
His fingers curled and the sound that followed wasn't the soft scrape of nails. It was a dry, delicate click like bone against stone.
He stared down.
'Those aren't nails.' Lucien thought as he looked down.
They looked like small black claws, slightly curved, too natural to be considered some kind of illusion.
His breath caught in his chest, but even that felt different... fuller, deeper, almost too calm, like panic struggled to exist within his body.
Then came the senses.
The world didn't just look clear... it looked painfully detailed. Every crack in the arena's stone floor felt close enough to touch.
The air carried scents he had never noticed before: dust so old it literally smelled like forgotten history, something metallic beneath the surface, and an underlying sweetness that made his throat tighten even though he didn't know why.
His hearing sharpened in a way that made silence louder than noise. He could hear the faint shifting of the creature's skin like wet fabric dragged across flesh.
He could hear the soft pulse of his own heartbeat, slow and steady, like it had changed rhythm without asking him first.
His body felt lighter, yet stronger... as if any sudden movement would send him farther than he intended.
Lucien swallowed.
That was when he noticed another thing... even his saliva tasted different, rich and warm, like something inside him was changing from the deepest part outward, replacing whatever he had been with something he did not recognize.
He raised a hand to his mouth, touched one of the sharp points, and pulled back as a thin bead of blood welled up on his fingertip.
The creature's head suddenly snapped toward him. Its frame contorted with liquid grace, razor-edged limbs uncoiling as it dropped into a hunter's crouch.
The creature's pale flesh rippled, muscles and tendons sliding beneath translucent skin as it prepared to strike.
Every movement of the creature promised swift, silent dismemberment.
And behind it, the shadows birthed dozens more.
The arena erupted into chaos. Perfect silence shattered into a symphony of clicking bones and whispered death.
And they were coming for blood.
They poured out of the tunnel into the arena like a nightmare given flesh. In seconds, roughly forty of the clawed creatures filled the ring.
They moved with that distinctive start-stop rhythm that marked them as something fundamentally wrong... like watching a glitch in reality's code try to process organic movement.
Two of the creatures collided in their forward rush, a ballet of lethal limbs that sent one stumbling.
The other creature caught its fallen comrade's corpse, and its serrated hand cut clean through the beast's body.
No resistance.
The creature's body split perfectly in two, steam rising from the perfectly cauterized edges. Internal organs spilled onto the sand with wet, meaty thuds.
Lucien wasn't sure he wanted to know what would happen if they actually tried to kill something.
The pack spread out in lawless clumps, with no clear direction or guidance. There was no alpha here, no order.
Each scrambled toward Lucien with desperate hunger, ignorant to the other creatures around it.
Although they were monsters he could also tell that they weren't fully grown. He could only imagine what a full-grown one was like.
Behind him, beams of light slithered across the ground from some unknown source, but Lucien couldn't tear his eyes from the advancing horrors. He tried to calculate angles of attack or escape routes, but came up empty.
This wouldn't end well.
Although he was raised sheltered and hadn't exactly gotten in a real fight before he still knew what to do.
Well he didn't have a weapon.
'Actually I do have a weapon.' Lucien though as he flexed his new claws and his enhanced vision sharpened instinctively as they neared.
The first creature to reach him launched itself forward, moving so fast it left afterimages.
But Lucien's combat-enhanced senses had already mapped the killing field, his new reflexes launching him into that split-second gap between the creature's tell and its strike.
His claws punched through translucent flesh with precision. Black fluid pulsed once through alien veins as his fingers found what passed for a kill zone in this thing's twisted anatomy.
The kill was clean. Clinical. Almost disappointing in its simplicity.
Still, the moment held a certain brutal poetry, like watching death itself learn a new trick.
He might not know what caused the changes in his body, but he knew he had to stay alive somehow.
The blood of the creature mistakenly fell in his mouth and he felt it.
It started in his forearms. His veins burned, as though molten metal were replacing his blood. His muscles stretched like taffy pulled over a metal hook.
His bones cracked as they realigned, each nerve ending screaming as it forged new pathways through his changing body. The world around him stretched into slow motion, perfectly clear.
Even as he evolved, however, the waves of creatures never slowed. Their movements clacked and chittered, a symphony of broken bones and clicking tongues.
"Holy shit," Lucien breathed as he flexed his fingers. New muscle wrote itself into his already honed instinct, turning his arms into precision instruments that could match these creatures edge for edge.
A calm voice echoed in his mind, smooth and emotionless.
[Think you can kill them all]
'What was that?'