Limitless Evolution As a Snake

00:03

Accept it! I yell into the white. DO IT NOW!

[System: Yeah nah, this one’s a doozy. Calculating soul value against the necro-toxin debt now, hang tight.]

Like I’m a house being repossessed, and somewhere out there some cosmic bank guy is checking if I’m worth more dead or alive.

00:02

Doesn’t matter. I meant it. That’s the acceptance speech. Take it or leave it.

00:01

Some tiny voice in the back of my skull, the one that sounds suspiciously like the 35-year-old loser who used to eat instant noodles alone watching other people’s Instagram stories, whispers Don’t let it take everything, and I shove it down because it’s too late, pal, already roaring, already committed, already halfway gone.

00:00.

Something inside my chest just breaks open, like a rope snapping after being pulled too tight for too long. There’s no warning, no countdown flash, just this white-hot line of pain shooting straight up my spine and into my skull, and I want to scream, but I don’t even have a mouth right now, I’m a ghost, I’m just floating pain with a vague sense of self attached to it.

[System: Offer accepted.]

The red goes from pulsing to solid, like the whole void just took a breath and held it. My scales feel tight all of a sudden, too small for whatever’s happening underneath them. Somewhere in my chest something that used to be a heartbeat does one last very human, very scared little stutter.

And then the number just isn’t there anymore.

[HUMAN BLUEPRINT PURGED]

Old Mate’s voice isn’t trembling anymore. It’s gone flat and quiet, the way people get right before they watch something get run over.

The words burn red across the dark, bigger than anything I’ve seen this thing throw at me before, and they don’t fade like usual. They just sit there, glowing, like they want me to really look at them and understand what I just did.

That’s it, the whole eulogy. No candles, no sad music, no bloke in a suit saying nice things about me that aren’t true. Just two words sitting in the dark where a countdown used to be, and somewhere underneath my ribs I feel something let go that I didn’t know I was still holding onto this whole time.

And I feel it. That’s the worst part. I feel the human part of me get scraped out like the last bit of peanut butter from the jar, that scratchy hollow sound except it’s happening inside my own soul. Thirty-five years of being a normal guy, all the boring stuff, dead-end job memories, the shape of my old face, the weight of my old hands, all of it just curling up and turning to ash somewhere behind my ribs.

I try to hold onto it. Some dumb instinct kicks in, some part of me going, wait, wait, I might need that later, and I claw at the feeling like I can shove it back in, but it’s already gone. There’s nothing to grab. It’s like trying to catch smoke with a fishing net.

The pain doesn’t stop; it just changes shape. Now it’s not burning; it’s pulling. Something grabs the back of my spirit like a fist closing around a rope, and I get yanked backward so hard the void around me smears into streaks of black and red.

I’m falling, or being thrown.

Everything goes white, and there’s a table in front of me that definitely wasn’t there a second ago.

Wooden, scratched up, the kind of table you’d find in a pub. And sitting on the other side of it is a fat koala. Wearing a singlet that’s too small for his gut, holding a beer bottle that’s already half empty, and staring at me as I owe him money.

”Oh good, you’re awake,” he says. ”Reckon we need to have a chat, mate.”

I try to say something back, but my mouth isn’t working right. The pain is everywhere, a deep structural wrongness. It feels like my spine was uncoiled into a straight line, then tied back into a knot, every scale peeled off and glued on in the wrong order.

Old Mate doesn’t wait for me to catch up. He leans forward, elbows on the table, and points one stubby claw straight at the ledger sitting between us. I didn’t notice the ledger before. I definitely notice it now, because it’s glowing faintly and covered in numbers that look like they’re actively getting worse the longer I stare at them.

”Oi,” he says, voice flat and hard in a way I haven’t heard from him before. ”No more human, ya drop kick.”

I just stare, my eyes unblinking because they can’t blink anymore. The world is just a constant, unbroken stream of input now. ”What?”

”You heard me, no, more, human.” He says each word slowly, like I’m the thick one here. ”You’ve been runnin’ round thinkin’ you’re bulletproof cause you dodged a few bad nights. Newsflash, mate, you’re not bulletproof. You’re a bloody idiot who almost carked it on a rooftop.”

He’s not wrong, but hearing it out loud stings. Part of me wants to argue that I am bulletproof now, or at least I’m about to be. This whole death-rebirth thing is basically a power-up sequence, right?

The ledger slams shut on its own.

Not me, not him, just THUD. Loud enough that I feel it in my skull, the sound rolls through the white space like a gunshot, and for a second all I can hear is the ringing aftermath.

”You’re a lunatic,” Old Mate mutters, scratching at the stained singlet stretched over his gut. ”Absolute nutcase. Only bloke I know who’d rather die tryin’ to look cool.”

Then he chucks the beer bottle at my head. It comes flying across the table so fast my instincts barely have time to react. My head snaps to the side, a purely reptilian dodge, and the bottle whistles past my scales, shattering somewhere behind me in the white nothing.