Chương 40: ??? - Two Weeks of Excessive Force

Julietta had not been having a good time the past couple of weeks, but it probably said something unpleasant about her that she'd had significantly worse times. Getting suddenly teleported into a galactic televised death game? Not her idea of fun, but neither is fighting in a war and that was just a death game with extra steps.

Unlike her experience with war, however, the people on her side had been concerningly, enthusiastically competent at the whole 'mass slaughter' thing, and had been winning the competition so handedly that Julietta was starting to feel a little bad about it. Not that she was going to mention it to her teammates. She wasn't suicidal. There was one girl who seemed to be able to just summon arbitrary weaponry out of her ass at-will, and… okay, maybe Julietta could take her.

Depended on what those cybernetics are capable of, but Cat seemed at least mostly chill. She was fine. Relatively speaking. But the other two? Holy moly. The Elaine girl kept complaining about her restrictive code of ethics despite having teleported parachutes off of people while they were using them, and Julietta knew she could have just shot their heads off with a death laser and made the whole thing a lot less painful. Absolute maniac behavior. And her biological makeup was…

god, it was actively difficult to not copy that woman's body permanently. She was not human. She was not even remotely human. She was so much better. It was intoxicating. And on the subject of things that weren't human, Julietta was pretty sure the other lady was just a straight-up motherfucking vampire. Like literally, an actual real vampire. Where Elaine's biology was immaculate, Ariane's biology was absolute wacky-woohoo nonsense.

Whenever Julietta tried to investigate the woman using her domain to try and figure out what was going on, it felt like something shoved an icicle up her ass at the mere insinuation that any place Ariane occupies could be someone else's domain. That's not even how domains work, it was just happening anyway. It was terrifying. … But after more than a week of it? It was almost boring.

Julietta barely even had to do anything with multiple goddesses of slaughter on her team, though she did her best to pull her weight where she could. If she didn't, the vampire would just keep gently pushing her to 'take some of the hunt for herself' like she was a baby bird that needed a nudge out of the nest to fly. The carnage had at least produced many different corpses, which Julietta had been happily slurping up to shore up her power reserves.

Her team caught her eating a body pretty early on, but all she had to do was explain what she was doing and everyone was pretty cool with it. So that was refreshing, at least. When Ariane pulled a dragon out of her soul and had everyone ride it up into an extradimensional space ship, Julietta's main thought was 'sure, why not?' At this point, where else could this go?

She was pretty sure the insane magical war machines in the shape of ladies didn't plan on killing her after all this was over, and based on substantial evidence throughout the entirety of the carnage it seemed as though there was very little else that mattered in this world. But there were at least a few other things that mattered. And one of them was definitely the words 'Specimen Lab.' Julietta was more than happy to break off from her 'team' and check what that was about.

Cat joined her, and while she was more than welcome Julietta couldn't help but wonder why.

"I know I haven't done a lot yet, but I promise I'll be fine on my own," Julietta assured her.

"I figured if you were checking out a science lab you might want a translator," Cat said. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Oh, no, I can translate for myself," Julietta answered.

"I just have to turn into one of these aliens and I'll be able to speak and read their language."

"Oh, cool," Cat nodded, shooting one of those aliens through the head.

"Also I mostly just plan on eating absolutely everything and figuring it all out as I go, so I won't really need it."

"Hmm," Cat frowned.

"I guess maybe you aren't the sane one of the group." As Julietta ripped an alien assailant to pieces with several tentacles and formed bubbles of flesh around their dismembered parts to more easily digest them, she couldn't help but feel like that comment was rather uncalled for. Well, whatever. The biological samples here were incredible, and that was truly what mattered at the end of the day. Julietta couldn't help but form some of the best parts of the various creatures she passed, scanned, and devoured.

Some novel musculature here, some fascinating limb designs there, some delightfully efficient respiratory techniques… it was just all so cool! Taking advantage of the extra mass, Julietta kept growing, shifting, improving, expanding until the whole lab had been gobbled up! It was hard to keep track of all the new body parts she was trying out at once, but she didn't really need to. Why walk when you could flow?

The process of shapeshifting itself is all she needed to rush down a hallway in a tide of screaming flesh, extending in front of herself while shrinking the backside of herself in a momentumless advance. Just pure growth, personified in a forward direction. With all her new sensory options, it was easy to find where she was supposed to be going to meet up with the rest of her team.

"Oh, hey, it's Julietta! Hi! Does anyone here have new genetic material for you?" Everything always does. More templates are always welcome. Julietta lunges towards one of the aliens, scanning them, feeling them, knowing them before their inevitable demise!

"Please!" the alien pilot begs.

"If you're going to kill me, at least make it quick and not terrifyingly, existentially messed up in some way!"

"Ah, sorry mate," Wepwawet says.

"Thundamoo's writing this section. You're fucked." Not having any idea what that was supposed to mean, Julietta peeled the pilot apart bit by bit, burrowed into their body as a flowing tide of flesh, engulfed them inside her domain and carefully analyzed every reaction to their brain being torn apart from the inside. Then, and only then, did she take control, repairing all the damage she had done and claiming the body as her own.

Piloting the pilot like a puppet, she wandered over to the controls, waved her hands over them and felt for instinctive responses.

"Whatcha doin'?" Elaine asked.

"Testing the instinctive responses in this guy's brain to see if there's any reaction to the idea of sending us home," the alien's mouth was forced to say in perfect English.

"I think I'm getting something over… yep. Transdimensional portal controls. Bingo."

"Do you think we should slaughter the rest of the living things onboard before we go?" Ariane asked.

"It'll either encourage them to either never come after us again or declare war on our entire world, and I think both have solid potential merits."

"I'll probably need a bit to figure all of this out, you're welcome to go kill everyone if you want to," Julietta answered. Ariane did want to. She had a wonderful time.

"If nothing else, it's nice that I got a boatload of points from all this," Cat hummed.

"Yeah, weirdly? I'm kinda glad this happened," Julietta admitted.

"I've got so much biomass, and so many incredible new forms."

"None of these losers were worth any experience to me," Elaine sighed.

"I feel cheated."

"Well, Elaine might be the lucky one, actually," Wepwawet chimed in.

"Since she has the least to lose."

"I don't like the sound of that," Julietta frowned.

"Come on guys, it's April 1st!" Wepwawet reminded the audience.

"Absolutely none of this is even remotely canon." Julietta and Cat looked at Wepwawet with dumbfounded expressions on their faces, but Elaine just sighed.

"Stupid fairies."