by Neven Iliev
It was just about to move on from this place and continue its aimless journey down the road when it stopped to consider part of the wrecked stagecoach. There was a miraculously intact wheel hanging on a less-than-intact axle. Boxxy’s violent digging through the wreckage had disturbed it, causing it to spin around ever so slowly as it hung off the piece of wood.
When Snack mentioned the wagons while she was scouting ahead earlier, she had described them as ‘huge boxes humans use to move stuff around.’ The Mimic had never actually seen it in motion, so it just assumed those horses were just dragging it along the ground. After all, the carriage’s round ‘legs’ were clearly lacking feet, knees, or any other discernible joints. Because they weren’t legs at all, they were wheels. They spun around instead of moving up and down, allowing the carriage to roll across the relatively flat ground.
And it was this seemingly inconsequential piece of common knowledge that captivated Boxxy. It more or less understood that rolling around was a more efficient form of movement than walking, especially on flat surfaces. That was knowledge it had gleaned during its brief time handling the gigantic dungeon core. True, it was heavy and looked like it was tricky to control at high speed, but it still moved much faster than if Arms were to carry it around on her back.
Curious as to how good these wagons would be at that sort of thing, it took a run up and slammed at full force into the side of the mostly empty food wagon. The vehicle rocked violently but didn’t budge. The Mimic let out a disappointed sigh as its enthusiasm deflated. It then realised that those ‘round feet’ would only roll in a particular direction. An understandable mistake, all things considered. So the monster repositioned itself and tried again, this time from the back if the carriage.
*SLAM*
*Kotororor*
It moved! How mysterious! Boxxy repeated the process a few more times, using its magical perception to observe the wheels and axles as it slowly inched the vehicle forward. As for the purpose of this entire exercise, it was to fulfil an unerring law of this world:
Mimics gotta mimic.
If a giant box could have wheels and axles, then why couldn’t a smaller one? That was the thought that drove the monster to move the carriage around and observe its means of motion. After about ten minutes of studying it, the Mimic decided it had seen enough, stopped playing around with the wagon and sat down on the ground. Half of its spider legs retracted completely inside its body, while the remaining four became short, thick, and straight.
Now came the moment of truth: The Mimic had to form the actual wheels. It did this by pumping its Biomass reserves into those stumpy legs. Eight long, fleshy rods grew out from each of those, growing outwards until they were just under sixty centimetres in length. The tips of these organic sticks split in two up to around the halfway point, then stretched outwards to form a bent T shape. The split up tips then met each other to form one long, flawless circle.
[Proficiency level increased. Shapeshift is now Level 7. AGI +1. DEX +1. END +2.]
It took the Mimic about two minutes to create four spoked, faux-wood wheels, each with a radius of just over thirty centimetres. What looked like wood was actually condensed and hardened tissue that became a sort of cartilage – an organic, rubbery substance that was good at absorbing vibrations and withstanding impacts. The wheels were positioned in such a way that the chest would have to travel sideways like a miniature wagon filled with teeth and murderous intent.
Boxxy hesitantly started moving its newly forged ‘feet’ around. The shape was a bit inconvenient but couldn’t be helped. After all, the wagon it copied them from was longer than it was wider, so the Mimic would have to assume a similar construction, at least at first. It was confident that, with some trial and error, it would find the right setup to ensure maximum stability. Much like when it created its favourite spider legs for the first time.
However, such an adjustment period turned out to be unnecessary. After all, a carriage was chest-shaped, but a spider was not. By copying the work of skilled craftsmen, Boxxy actually found very little adjustments that needed to be made. If anything, its imitation product turned out to far surpass the original. After all, the four wheels stuck to the side of the creature were living things that could be bent and angled in any direction at will.
Feeling proud of itself, Boxxy then decided to move around. It flexed the muscles at the base of its axle-legs, forcing the wheels to rotate under their own power. That was when it discovered the first major flaw with its brilliant transformation: power management. The overeager box put too much power into the motion, causing a sudden burst of acceleration that launched it sideways faster than expected. It travelled several metres in an instant, which then showed the second flaw with its new ‘invention.’
[Your muscles have ripped. HP -87.]
[You have been dismembered. HP -154.]
The very muscles used to power the rotational momentum gave out. Although they were flexible and malleable, they had a limit as to how many times they could twist around an axle before tearing. With the tissue holding them in place severed, the freshly grown quartet of wheels and axles detached from the base of the Mimic. They rolled off into the distance or flew up into the air, spraying yellow blood all over the place. Their owner, currently busy hissing and cursing at the sudden pain, slammed into the ground and skidded across it for a little bit, scratching up its sensitive underside.
“What the fuck is it doing?” asked Kora, with a perplexed look on her face.
“Hyehn, heeeeh, aaauuu…” moaned Xera with her tongue sticking out and her eyes rolled up into her head.
“Right, good point.”
The fiend then gave up on worrying about the silly box and resumed pounding the face-down-ass-up succubus’s tight asshole with renewed vigour.
Part Six
Having recovered from its pathetic crash, Boxxy was forced to re-examine its approach. Creating a detached joint that would allow the wheels to spin as much as they wanted was possible, but it also came with a good amount of risk. Doing that would make it much easier for them to come loose and break off should the monster go over rough terrain. Ah, but the Mimic could just revert them back into legs if it wanted to go off-road. However, the earlier incident did manage to prove one thing: Moving around on wheels was far easier than walking.
So the animate chest decided to give this new mode of transportation another go without feeling disheartened. This was hardly the first time it failed at shapeshifting, anyway. It messed up multiple times back when it was still learning how to use those spider legs or how eyes worked, so trial and error was hardly a foreign concept to it. Well, forming these wheels took quite a lot longer than those arachnid limbs, but that was a temporary setback. Muscle memory was a terrifying thing that meant even complex creations like Xera’s upper body could be thrown together in an instant with enough practice.
First of all, however, it needed to deal with the Biomass it lost when those prototype wheels flew off into the distance. It was not an insignificant amount. At least rectifying that turned out to be as simple as opening its Storage and depositing roughly five kilograms of strawberry jam directly into its gullet. It was pretty flavourless to the monster, no different from eating leaves, wood, or spinal fluid, but it would still do the job of replenishing its lost body mass after being digested.
Once that was done, it once again grew out those circular limbs in mostly the same fashion, but with one key difference. This time it created the flexible joint at the spot where the wheel and the axle connected, rather than where the limb poked out of its body. That was when it ran into its first major hurdle. It would need to completely detach the wheels from the axles, but doing so would effectively cut them off from its own body. This was not a particularly attractive proposition, as the wheel-shaped body mass would devolve into meat paste once separated from the main body.
What about continuously shapeshifting the connecting tissue so that it would untwist, thus preventing it from snap
ping? That seemed like it might work, so the Mimic gave it a try. It willed its new limbs to rotate, taking extra care to use as little strength as possible. The box-cart inched forward at a snail’s pace. After the wheels made three revolutions each, it felt the strain on the connecting tissue and willed it to untwist itself without detaching, then kept moving forward. Doing so allowed it to keep going, covering a distance of several metres before it safely came to a stop.
Well, that method worked, but the concentration required to carry out the constant, minute shapeshifting was pretty taxing. Moving in such a manner would be more tiring and slower than simply walking. Plus, allowing momentum to carry it downhill would undoubtedly cause the wheels to spin too fast and tear the connecting tissue anyway. And mere practice would be unable to make it speed up to a point where this wasn’t an issue. Unlike the ‘fire and forget’ actions of growing limbs and then using them, this was an ongoing process that required constant attention and muscle flexing.
In short, this method of moving around defeated the purpose of having wheels in the first place. Simple walking along and tumbling down a hill would prove to be much easier than –
“Aha!”
Boxxy got an idea. Rather than trying to mimic the entire cart, didn’t it only need to focus on the wheels themselves? After all, that dungeon core rolled around just fine even though it was one solid object with no moving parts. Surely something similar was entirely within the Mimic’s reach.
The four fleshy discs and their axles were quickly reabsorbed back into its main body, leaving it to sit on the ground. Next it grew two slightly larger wheels about eighty centimetres in diameter on its sides. These were firmly attached to its body and would not rotate at all. Instead of a carriage, the Mimic assumed the form of a slightly misshapen spool. As long as it was like this, it could roll around as much as it wanted.
Then came another problem: propulsion. Moving about like this under its own power was going to be difficult, to say the least. It would need a push to get going and yet more pushing to keep rolling. Going downhill was going to be easy enough, but it was still dependant on outside assistance. After all, it couldn’t just push itself.
Or could it? Technically speaking, the ground wasn’t that far away and it still had a good deal of Biomass to spare. So it grew out a set of four spiderish limbs, much shorter than the usual ones. They were also positioned much differently. One poked out from its front, a second from behind, the third from its bottom, and the last from the top of its lid. Preparations complete, Boxxy then coiled the leg on the bottom and kicked at the ground with it, pushing itself forward and up.
This got the chest rolling ever so slightly forward. Then the leg coming out from its front did the same, then the top leg, then the hind leg, then the bottom leg. Each kick added more momentum to its revolution, and soon it was rolling along at an impressive pace. Its current speed was actually close to its full sprint, but it used only a fraction of the effort required to maintain it.
It was moving forward in an energy-efficient manner and without hurting itself. So far so good. But the problem was that this method made its entire body spin around along with the wheels. Even with the monster’s magical perception it ‘looked’ like the ground was spinning around it at high speeds and gave off the unpleasant sensation that it was constantly falling. Deciding it’d had enough, Boxxy hit the brakes by causing its wheels to break apart into legs of their own. The sturdy limbs dug into the ground, killing the monster’s momentum in an instant. And none too soon; a few metres more and it would have fallen into that deep canyon that ran alongside the cobblestone road.
“Wow, I was sure it was gonna fall off the cliff!” remarked Xera.
“Tell me about it,” agreed Kora. “I guess even that loony box isn’t stupid enough to throw itself off a cliff.”
The two familiars were currently taking a break between their lewd acts, though it was mostly to let the fiend recover. Even a rape-happy demon from another dimension couldn’t keep up with the insatiable succubus’s demands. That was the reason both of them were idly observing Boxxy’s antics while still connected at their lower ends.
“I guess all that INT gain wasn’t just for show after all, huh?” mused Xera while slowly massaging the half-mast member lodged in her rectum.
“Nah, can’t be that. I mean I’m always the same regardless of how much INT I have, so it can’t be that big a deal.”
“You’re right, it really doesn’t matter for you. You’d need over 9,000 of that Attribute before you get any thoughts worth a damn.”
“As if! I have plenty of thoughts!” insisted the fiend.
“Any of them that don’t relate to fighting and/or fucking?”
“ … No.”
“And that is precisely why I keep telling you to just disappear and leave your dick behind.”
“Oh I’m definitely going to leave my dick inside a behind!”
“Ugh, that was terribleeeaaaah!”
Break time was over. Kora’s member had suddenly sprung back to life, allowing the two demons to pick up where they left off. Meanwhile, Boxxy was already thinking hard about its latest experience. The spool-chest accomplished its goals of conserving energy while travelling at high speed, but the inability to properly navigate and steer under such conditions was a major drawback. It would need to keep its body upright and relatively stable if it planned to do either of those things. Its thoughts drifted back to that cart, causing it to once again contemplate whether it should form ‘detached’ wheels after all.
It instinctively knew that would be pointless, but it was worth a shot. It picked itself up off the ground and grew another, much smaller wheel. It attached it to the axle part in exactly the same way as the carriage did, then ‘let go’ of it.
[You have lost a part of your body. HP -25.]
Forcefully separating a part of its flesh caused Boxxy to lose HP and Biomass. The wheel itself quickly lost pigmentation and consistency and melted into a sort of unidentifiable dull-red sludge over the next few seconds, making the whole exercise a waste of time and energy. Such was the downside of having extremely malleable flesh. Once cut away it would quickly lose its assumed form and turned into to what could only be described as a thick, fleshy soup.
The Mimic was aware this would happen, but it tried it anyway. It actively challenged its instincts in order to get better acquainted with its body. It waited for several seconds for its HP to recover to full, just in case, then tried it again to hold onto the wheel without being directly connected to it.
[You have lost a part of your body. HP -25.]
It failed, just as expected. Simply touching the flesh of the wheel was not enough, it needed a medium through which to transmit nutrients and commands to it. It had to be attached and detached at the same time. Both a part of it and something else entirely. Was such a paradox possible?
Or rather, was stressing over this really that big a deal? Boxxy could survive just as well without ever needing to use wheels. Sure, they looked convenient, but that was only on mostly flat terrain, of which the wilderness had a shocking shortage of. Objectively speaking, the box had no reason for wanting wheels. They were, simply put, not necessary to its survival in any way, shape, or form. In fact, given how it had lost quite a bit of HP and nearly threw itself into a ravine, they were more of an enemy than an ally at that point.
But the Mimic did not give up. It was a creature born of patience, to the point where it was incredibly stubborn and would very rarely change its stance on something. The last time it did that was when the object of its desire ended up causing a magical disaster that wiped out an entire city in an instant. It was safe to assume that it would take a downside of that grand a scale to make it give up on experimenting with those wheels.
And so Boxxy entered a cycle of growing a wheel and trying to detach it without detaching it, watching it melt into sludge, waiting a short while to recover HP and starting all over again. That lasted for about thirty minutes
before it stopped to take a small break and devour yet another normally suicidal amount of strawberry jam to maintain its Biomass.
While there was no progress on the wheel front, at least it was starting to enjoy the fruit-based condiment somewhat. The taste was still bland, but the thick consistency of it was oddly pleasing. It reminded the Mimic of the only piece it managed to rip off that Fleshmaiden and how it had reverted into a tasty, viscous goop that was a lot denser than it seemed to be. If there was ever such a thing as jam made out of flesh, it would be that. It even remembered finding a piece of her stuck between its teeth later, which was a pleasant surprise. How could something so goopy be so sticky? It was almost like it wanted to become a part of –
“… Huh.”
Struck with a burst of inspiration, the Mimic spent the rest of the night fiddling with and refining the all-important wheel-to-axle joint. After numerous failures and having to replenish its Biomass many times, it finally achieved a halfway working prototype.
It had created a limb that was completely unlike anything else it or its familiars had ever seen before and something that had no right being part of a living creature. The middle portion was a solid disc with a radius of about six centimetres. Twenty-five-centimetre-long spokes then came out of it to form the rest of the wheel. The connecting joint between it and the axle leg was also very different from its previous attempts. The unnatural hinge was covered by an equally unnatural wet bulge – a ball of writhing red flesh around eight centimetres in diameter. It tightly hugged both parts of the solid inner part of the wheel, creating a vacuum-tight seal that was also slippery enough to allow the wheel to turn with minimal friction.
And turn it did.
Boxxy lifted its latest iteration above the ground and stretched out a tongue tentacle. It grabbed one of the spokes and gave it a good yank. It spun smoothly and silently around its axis. Nothing tore up and the wheel didn’t wither. Except that the tentatively-named ‘flesh jam’ started leaking around it and splattering everywhere. The exact mix for it needed to be refined, but that was just a minor detail at that point.