The hunger was a grinding, incessant ache, far more profound than any missed meal Lark had experienced as a twenty-one-year-old gamer glued to a screen. It was a physical demand that resonated deep within the marble-white musculature of Alabaster Woe's towering frame, an echoing emptiness that required immediate, tangible sustenance.
Lark had spent the last twenty minutes walking deliberately, his long, elegant strides covering ground with a silence that betrayed his massive size. He needed tools. The crudely bound vines acting as his makeshift clothing offered protection against nothing, least of all the teeth or claws of whatever this dreadful new world contained.
He stopped at a sheer geographical outcropping. A boulder of gray, crystalline rock, easily the size of a small car, jutted violently from a packed dirt slope. It was the perfect raw material.
"Alright, let's see if this 'resonant sculpting' is more precise than just shattering things," Lark muttered, his voice dropping into the multi-toned, unnervingly deep register of his avatar body. It sounded like two basses speaking in perfect harmony, a sound that should not come from a human throat.
He placed his elongated, five-fingered hand against the cold, unforgiving surface of the boulder. The smooth, marble skin of his palm pressed against the grit. He closed the sapphire eyes that studded the back of his hand, focusing the panoramic awareness granted by the dozens of other eyes scattered across his body into a single, intense point of concentration.
Lark began to vibrate.
It was not a tremor, nor a shake. It was an application of fundamental, controlled frequency. The gold veins faintly pulsing beneath his skin intensified their light for a moment, and the low, internal hum of his being rose sharply in pitch, targeting the atomic composition of the stone itself.
The rock did not crack. It did something far stranger.
Under the focused, ultrasonic pressure, the crystalline structure of the gray rock began to liquefy, but only temporarily and only within the precise confines of Lark's imposed frequency. The rock flowed like semi-molten wax beneath his fingers, retaining its heatless, gray sheen.
Lark treated the boulder as if it were soft, heavy clay. He pulled and stretched the material, guiding the flow with minute adjustments to his internal resonance. He began to draw out five spear shafts, each one requiring meticulous shaping. The shafts needed to be perfectly straight, tapering to a deadly, needle-sharp point, and thick enough to withstand significant impact, yet balanced enough to throw.
The process took effort. He could feel the resistance of the material fighting the imposed frequency, but his body, the true heart of Alabaster Woe, seemed engineered for this very task. After ten minutes of focused, silent work, he stepped back.
Five spears lay nestled against the boulder. Each was six feet long, honed to a wicked, seamless point, entirely carved from dense, smooth stone. They were not brittle. They hummed faintly with the memory of the resonance that had shaped them.
Lark lifted the first one. It weighed perhaps eighty pounds, a weight that would strain the limits of three men working together. Yet, in his hand, it felt like a heavy stick.
He flexed his arm, the marble segments of his bicep tensing like polished granite. He looked at the spears, then at the remnants of the massive boulder he had casually sculpted.
"This is absurd," he murmured, stepping away from the creative residue. "I'm holding a spear that weighs more than I did a week ago, and I feel zero strain. My base strength… it's genuinely terrifying."
He calculated, comparing the ease of this labor to the weight lifting records he remembered from his previous life. A peak human might deadlift six hundred pounds on a good day, maybe even a thousand for a brief moment of maximum effort. But to effortlessly lift eighty pounds repeatedly, to reshape a car-sized rock with only internal vibration and touch?
"I have to be at least ten times the strength of a peak human," he concluded, a faint shiver running through him, not of cold, but of awe at his own monstrous physicality. "This body is a walking siege weapon."
He gathered the five spears, tucking four under his left arm, the smooth stone shafts finding purchase easily against the sculpted plane of his side. He kept the fifth in his right hand, ready.
Now, speed. Survival demanded quick transit.
Lark shifted his weight and pushed off the ground, intending to accelerate gradually. The result was instantaneous and startling. The world blurred. His long legs devoured the distance, his eight-foot height giving him a massive stride length. The trees became vertical smears of green and brown.
He compensated immediately, engaging his internal resonance to provide micro-adjustments to his footing, preventing him from careening headlong into a stout oak. The control was there, layered beneath the raw power.
"How fast is this?" he whispered into the rush of wind, his vine clothing snapping around him. His vision, thanks to the panoramic awareness of the dozens of closed sapphire eyes, handled the speed without strain. He could track individual leaves spinning off branches as he passed them.
If a human sprinter clocked in at twenty-five miles per hour, and an enhanced human could perhaps manage fifty or sixty, Lark realized he was moving at an almost frightening clip, effortlessly maintaining a pace that destroyed the notion of human endurance.
"Five times a peak human speed… maybe more," he estimated, slowing down slightly to conserve energy, settling into a hyper-efficient, ground-eating jog that still put him far past any recorded terrestrial speed. "This is ridiculous. I'm a mobile artillery platform."
He ran for what felt like an hour, the dense foliage giving way to sparser woods and then returning to near-jungle density. He monitored the sounds, the smells, relying on the unnerving totality of his new senses.
Then, he found something.
The creature was roughly fifty feet away, tearing at the base of a fallen, moss-covered tree. It was a bird, technically, but one that appeared to have been sculpted by a deeply disturbed geneticist obsessed with avian muscle mass and redundancy.
It stood five feet tall, its legs thick as a man's torso and terminating in massive, three-clawed feet. Its feathers were a hard, metallic black shot through with sickly green luminescence. But the true horror lay in its cranial structure. It had two heads, each mounted on a thick, corded neck. Both heads possessed large, predatory yellow eyes and beaks that looked less like tools for pecking and more like heavy-duty shears. The sheer bulk of the thing suggested it spent its life running through stone walls. It was, undeniably, a monster.
Lark's stomach cramped, not from fear, but from the brutal reminder of his hunger. This thing was meat. Dangerous, grotesque meat, but meat nonetheless.
He slowed to a complete stop, the motion so silent that the bird continued its noisy demolition of the tree. Lark slowly raised the stone spear from his right hand. The weight felt perfect, steadying and reassuring.
"Okay, Lark. Headshots win games," he instructed himself, his voice hushed and complex. "One clean throw. Use the resonance to keep it stable."
He focused his immense strength, not on raw power, but on the precise physics of the throw. The spear sliced through the still air.
He missed.
The spear drove deep into the dirt and moss three feet behind the avian monster, the sound of the impact muffled but definite.
The monster stopped tearing at the log.
Both heads swiveled simultaneously, their yellow eyes locking onto the towering, marble figure of Lark. The creature issued a sound like grating stone mixed with a steam whistle: a challenge.
"Dammit!" Lark hissed, already dropping the spent spear and reaching for one of the four spares tucked under his left arm. "You had one job, muscleman! One clean shot!"
He barely had time to grasp the next weapon before the Doppelbeak reacted. The ground beneath its massive legs erupted as it launched itself forward. It didn't run; it bounded in impossible, muscular leaps, covering the fifty feet separating them in barely two seconds.
Lark didn't have time to throw. The strategy shifted instantly. This wasn't a ranged encounter; it was suddenly a close-quarters melee against a beast fueled by unnatural steroids.
The bird came in low, aiming for his center mass with a blur of black and green feathers. Lark sidestepped the charging body with a grace that defied his size. The bird's momentum was massive, and Lark felt the heat of its passage.
As the beast surged past, Lark acted on instinct honed by thousands of hours of playing this character. He let go of the spear and lashed out with his left hand, scooping up one of the massive, thick necks just below the head. His marble fingers clamped down, sinking slightly into the tough, ropelike muscle structure.
The moment his hand gained purchase, Lark cycled his internal energies. He didn't focus the resonance externally onto the ground or a rock; he channeled it into the creature, using his entire body as a vibrational capacitor.
His marble skin shimmered faintly gold, and the low, multi-toned hum he carried intensified into a bone-rattling drone that only the bird could feel.
The bird's neck was suddenly the terminus of an intensely focused, high-frequency shockwave.
The head Lark was holding went instantly slack, its eye rolling back. The vibration wasn't merely disorienting it; it was shaking the fluids in its inner ear, rattling its brain against the inside of its thick skull, and beginning to shred the delicate tissues around its spine. The second head, however, reacted violently.
It lunged, its sharp beak snapping shut with the power of a hydraulic press, aiming for the nearest available flesh: Lark's right hand, which was reaching for a new spear.
Crunch.
The beak hit his marble hand with the force of a hammer blow. The sound was a loud, cracking impact.
The result was nothing.
The beak slid off the flawless, polished, unnaturally hard surface of Alabaster Woe's skin. Lark felt a dull, distant impact, like someone striking a statue with a piece of wood. There was no pain, no tear, not even a scratch on his golden-veined flesh. The bird's biological weapon, designed to crush bone and sever muscle, was utterly defeated by the innate durability of his chosen avatar.
The bird, perhaps sensing the futility of the bite, withdrew its head, issuing a distressed, choppy shriek.
But Lark was done with defense. His right hand found the stone spear he had dropped right next to him. He grasped the weapon securely.
The first head he held was now paralyzed, limp from the sustained neural overload. The body remained upright only because of the sheer density of its musculature.
Lark brought the spear up and thrust it with the full, terrifying power of his ten-times-peak-human strength.
He drove the razor-sharp stone point through the soft tissue where the neck met the body of the paralyzed head. The spear entered with a wet, tearing sound, shearing through feathers, muscle, and cartilage. The stone was utterly unhindered.
The point of the spear emerged from the other side of the neck, thick with dark, steaming blood.
The monster issued a choked, gurgling cry, its healthy head thrashing wildly, pulling against Lark's grip, its massive talons tearing up the earth.
Lark didn't wait. He maintained his grip on the neck and, with the spear still embedded, he brought his arm up and slammed the second spear he was holding into the main body of the beast, right beneath the wing joint. This was pure demolition.
The shaft penetrated deeply, piercing the monster's massive lungs. A sputtering, frothy spray of metallic-smelling blood immediately erupted around the wound.
The Doppelbeak collapsed onto its side, its massive legs kicking in spastic throes. The healthy head screamed, a sound of agony and confusion.
Lark moved quickly, brutally. He pulled the spear out of the shoulder, dragging it free with a sickening sound of torn tissue, and stabbed again, aiming for the center of the chest cavity, where he estimated the heart might lie.
The stone point encountered a dense resistance of bone and tendon, but the force behind it was simply too great. The spear punched through the sternum, shattering the bone into sharp, jagged fragments that drove inward.
The bird's struggling stopped. A final, ragged sound escaped the healthy head, which then simply slumped to the earth, its yellow eyes dimming and glazing over.
Lark stood over the carcass, breathing heavily, though not from cardiovascular exertion. It was the mental shock and the adrenaline dump. The smell of the hot, sickly blood and the unique odor of the monster's metallic feathers filled the air.
He looked down at the twin-headed corpse. The sheer amount of blood soaking into the earth was staggering. The marble skin of his hands was slick, stained a deep, alarming crimson.
Lark slowly let go of the stone spear. It clattered against the forest floor.
He was trembling slightly, the residual energy of the harmonic resonance fading from his body. That had been visceral. That had been terrifying. That had been necessary.
"I… I just killed a thing with two heads," he whispered, his echoing voice shaking with residual horror and sudden, profound relief. "I actually did it. I killed it. I survived."
He looked at his right hand. The skin was flawless. Not a mark. The monster's bite had literally been pointless.
"I'm sorry, bird-thing," he said softly, staring at the ruined, gore-drenched body. "But I am hungry."
Lark allowed himself a brief, celebratory, slightly maniacal laugh. His first kill. His first meal secured.
The subsequent hour was spent in grueling physical labor. The Doppelbeak was far heavier than it looked, perhaps seven hundred pounds of dense muscle and bone. Lark had to drag the immense carcass out of the immediate forest, tearing up the undergrowth as he pulled it by the intact leg.
He finally reached a small, clear meadow, a patch of brilliant green grass untouched by the deep shadows of the woods. It was open, defensible, and exposed to the weak sunlight filtering through the canopy.
He dropped the corpse with a massive, thudding sound.
The next task was fire. Simple, essential fire.
Lark gathered a large pile of dry fallen wood and smaller kindling. He looked at the vast, destructive power contained within his own body and the rudimentary task ahead. He knew he could probably shatter a tree with a touch, or turn the kindling into ash with resonance, but he needed a slow, controlled flame that he could maintain. He needed to be able to cook.
"You have supersonic speed and super strength, and you're about to try and make fire like a stone-age boy scout," he told himself, adopting a tone of utterly exhausted self-mockery. "This is the height of irony. It's either this or figuring out how to make fire with directed, focused vibration without accidentally exploding the fuel source."
He opted for the reliable method: the friction bow, though he had to rely on his innate strength and speed to speed up the process. He spent time carefully crafting a fire-board and a drill from particularly dry pieces of hardwood, using a small, jagged fragment of the stone spearhead to carve the necessary divots.
He knelt, his colossal, marble body seeming almost ridiculous bent over such a small, delicate task. He began turning the fire-stick between his large hands, rubbing the wood against the board with high friction.
Lark, who could move at the speed of a car, was now forced into the patient drudgery of creating a coal. The process demanded focused, unrelenting effort, and it felt like it took forever. He pushed and pushed, generating plumes of fragrant smoke, but the wood resisted combustion.
Sweat beaded on his brow, though it didn't feel like human sweat. It was more like clear oil mixed with faint golden dust, and it quickly evaporated from his marble skin.
He worked for what felt like an eternity, grunting with effort, trying to find the perfect balance between speed and sustainable pressure.
Finally, after nearly sixty minutes of frustrating, repetitive labor, a tiny, fragile coal glowed red within the ash pit of the fire-board.
Lark froze, staring at the small, miraculous speck of heat.
He gently nudged the coal into a nest of shredded, dry bark and carefully blew on it, controlling his breath with utmost care, despite the cavernous size of his mouth.
The small coal flared, catching the kindling. A hungry, golden flame erupted, growing slowly, tentatively, until it was robust enough to endure.
Lark sat back on his heels, watching the fire dance. The relief was immense, washing over the lingering terror of the fight. Food security and warmth, all in one small, flickering miracle.
He celebrated the second, quieter victory with just as much fervor as the first.
"Fire," he breathed. "I have fire. Take that, wilderness. I might be a horrific, eight-foot-tall marble monstrosity, but I can still make toast."
He retrieved one of the last remaining stone spears, used it to carefully lift the massive Doppelbeak carcass, and began to drag it toward the fire pit. It was time to figure out how to butcher a two-headed monster without the benefit of a knife or a basic understanding of its anatomy. The hardest part of survival was rarely the fighting; it was always the mundane, practical tasks that followed.