I panicked. The warning message echoed in my head, and all I could do was wait. I considered hiding, but had no idea where or from what. Soon, I found out. One wall was crumbling, but the odd part was that its fragments floated upward instead of falling. Confused, I tried to understand. Then a pain worse than any beating gripped me, as if every cell had nerve endings dunked in acid.

  ?

  I lay there on the floor, a broken mess. I tried to scream, but rather than sound, just blood poured out. I watched in horror as the blood began to crumble and float upwards. I was slowly being eroded out of existence, feeling every second of it. That’s when a golden screen appeared in front of me with the same strange writing.

  ?

  Unlawful deletion…..

  Finding peaceful resolution….

  Creating an alternative system…

  Finished…

  ?

  Entity Rakim Cisse, your deletion has been deemed unlawful by the accords presented to Entity Mr Pink. You have been offered the Monster System. Do you accept (Y/N)?

  ?

  I’ll be honest, I had no idea what any of that meant, but the strange understanding just told me that accepting the offer would allow me to survive. The pain was too much, and I shouted, “Yes!” through a mouthful of blood.

  ?

  That’s when things got a lot weirder. The pain just stopped. One moment it was there, the next, I couldn’t feel anything. I was completely frozen, unable to move anything but my eyes, and there was this suffocating silence as though the concept of noise had been erased. I don’t know how long I was stuck there in that derelict room in complete silence, unable to feel anything. I felt my mind begin to slip into insanity. The day had been crazy, and it was just becoming too much. Just as my mind was about to crack, more words appeared before me.

  ?

  Deletion successfully stopped…

  Creating Monsterized form…

  Severe Damage to the subject…

  Recreating form…

  ?

  That’s when everything spun out of control. In horror, I watched my entire body unravel into dazzling white particles—dissolving, ending. My thoughts spiraled, and as darkness swept over me, all I could think was, “Fuck me!”

  ?

  I awoke to the lovely sensation of sand in my mouth. I had expected to be wracked with pain again, but surprisingly, I felt fine. In fact, I felt better than I had in a long time. My mind was so clear, I had no idea how I even functioned before. Slowly, I rose to a seated position and looked down at my body. I was whole again. I had thought I might be healed by the system, but I had expected to have some scars or evidence of what I had gone through. If the memories were not so vivid in my mind, I would have begun to doubt it had ever occurred.

  ?

  I pulled myself out of the sand and marveled at how easy it was to get to my feet. I’d been a fairly fit guy most of my life, but this felt different. It was as though the connection between my brain and my body was a lot smoother. The lag I hadn’t known was there my whole life was gone. I messed around with snapping my fingers and doing loads of weeby hand signs (Don’t Judge, you’d have done it too). That's when the strange feeling of information downloading into my mind came back. This time, it was a bit different: for one, I couldn’t work out exactly what it was downloading into my mind until I moved a new limb without thinking about it. Starting from my lower back, above my butt, was an honest to god tail. A full-blown meter and a half-scaled tail with a tuft of black fur on the end.

  ?

  What the fuck happened to me? I thought. It was weird; even as I was surprised and weirded out by the tail, it felt like it had been there my whole life. Using it was as easy as writing with a pen or throwing a ball, both behaviours I had practiced many times in my life. I swung the thing about doing all sorts of stupid poses until I smashed it into a tree. I was ready to feel pain, but instead it was a dull sensation like that of knocking on a door. This, of course, would have been surprising enough, but when the tree snapped in half from the impact, I was left mouth gaping. Oh, the things I could have done with this, I thought, grinning to myself.

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  ?

  I decided to try and get a good look at myself and looked around. I was on a large stretch of beach staring out at an endless ocean. Behind me was a wall of vegetation in a kaleidoscope of colours from greens to blues to even oddly glowing purple plants. I was so enraptured by the scenery that I almost forgot to check my new body. But I managed to pull my attention back to myself. I started feeling around, and I was shocked to find that large portions of my body were covered in small, almost translucent golden scales. They covered my tail and my back completely. My arms were mostly covered, as was my neck. I thought my face was free from scales, but as I stroked where my beard had once been, I noticed there was a slight roughness. I was covered in scales; some were microscopic. That was awesome enough, but when I went to touch my head, praying that my locs I’d spent my whole life growing were still there, I was pleasantly surprised. My locs were still there and felt softer and more luscious than ever, but there was an even bigger surprise. I had horns! They weren’t huge, but they were big enough and curved into a wickedly sharp point. I didn’t know when or how, but I decided I was going to find an excuse to use them on something one day. Just as I was admiring myself, I was interrupted by the sound of something erupting from the sands.

  ?

  That was when reality hit me—I noticed I wasn’t wearing any clothes. a former gangster, you’d be surprised how often I ended up naked around other people, and so while being naked did bother me, it wasn’t my biggest concern. No, that was the huge ten-foot-tall crab with a pincer bigger than my torso, that had just erupted from the sand fifty feet away and was now scuttling towards me with a devious look in its eyes.

  ?

  Yeah, no, even if my new body was built for combat, I was not fighting a crab with no boxers or trousers on. That was just stupid. I was not going to risk my yoghurt slinger fighting Sebastian. I turned and ran down the beach. Which turned out to be the wrong thing to do, as I got ten steps until the sands all around me erupted into a veritable horde of crabs. I had just survived a near-death situation and probably died once, and now here I was about to be wiped out by a bunch of banana-hating crustaceans. Rage filled my heart as the thought of death brought back the pain that Sam and Jenson had put me through, not just the physical pain but the embarrassment and shame of how easily they stole control from me. My rage burned hotter until it hit a threshold, then I just felt cold inside, a calm sensation of controlled anger. It didn’t make my situation any better, but where I had just wanted to run out of fear, now I had a goal I needed to survive so I could get my revenge on those arseholes who’d left me for dead, and to do that, I needed to get through these crabs. I doubted I could kill them, but I was going to escape.

  ?

  I took a breath and focused on the now noticeable connection between my brain and body. This new body was stronger and better than my old one had ever been, and I had only just begun to explore its capabilities. With the connection in my mind, I let my imagination guide me. It was an insane feeling. Whatever I imagined my body doing, it was a whole new form of movement. I ran, leaping over one crab's pincer and landing on another's back. I did a backflip, avoiding the hammer swing of one crab. Unfortunately, for me, I had not counted on how much force was behind the swing, and while I had dodged it, the force of the blow blew me off course and into the path of another claw, which hit me straight in the stomach and sent me bouncing across the sand.

  ?

  I got to my feet winded but otherwise unharmed. I looked at my scaly form in wonder. I was certain that blow was going to split me in half. I looked down and saw there was a slight glow to the scales as they’d locked together in my lower abdomen. That was great and all, but what made me change my plans from survival by escape to survival by fighting was when I saw what the hammer blow I’d avoided had shattered the shell of the smaller crab whose back I’d landed on. That crab looked to be struggling with its movement, as several times it stumbled into its neighbours. I could make them take each other out, or at least weaken each other enough that I can maybe do some damage with my new body. an towards the crabs that were scuttling towards me. I jumped onto the back of the first one. It reached up, snipping at me. As one claw shot towards me, I grabbed the other one and used it as a shield. A move which proved very effective as the crab snapped off its own less dominant claw. I jumped off that crab as two more moved to swat me from its back. As I completed my jump, I landed on the previously injured crab. Using the severed claw in my hands, I decided to test my strength and swung the claw down with all my might. The claw didn’t do much damage to the shell, letting me know that I was not strong enough to crack it open, but something interesting did happen as I slammed down the claw a second time. It embedded itself into the crack on the crab's back, and it must have hit something vital, as the crab instantly went limp as it collapsed. This marked a change in the fight. The crabs all lost interest in me and swarmed over their fallen brethren. I watched in fascinated disgust as I watched the crabs turn to cannibalism. I was going to rush in all the gungho, but I’ll be honest, watching the crabs all digging around in their comrades' insides and stuffing their faces with their guts was making me feel physically sick. I felt my rage slip away as I decided to get as far from the gruesome sight as possible.