The familiar, coarse fabric of the black tracksuit felt foreign against Kale's skin.
It was more than just the sensation of wearing clothes again after days in a medical gown; it was as if his very epidermis had been replaced, the nerve endings underneath newly calibrated and hyper-aware.
He patted his chest, his sides, a slow, methodical inventory of his own body. Something was off.
'My tracksuit feels a bit large,' he thought, pinching a handful of excess fabric at his hip.
'And I thought it was straight from my closet. I seem to have lost some weight.' The observation was mundane, almost comforting in its simplicity, a problem he could understand.
He didn't yet grasp that the form beneath the cloth had been annihilated and meticulously rebuilt from the atomic level up.
The old Kale had died, starved, and been poisoned. This new body, regenerated by a violent fusion of alien science and raw beast essence, was a different instrument entirely.
