Survivor 3295743

5

After a few seconds of silently searching, I finally found its eyes far back on the upper sides of its triangular head. They were were maybe a little bigger than a baseball and another source of broken camouflage with dark amber irises and opaque pupils. This thing probably relied on the unstable muck to sense approaching land prey while being nearly blind could only use broken light above to see swimming prey.

The water here was not worth it so I simply left, walking upstream in the hopes that the current would be a deterrent. As much as I tried to keep a distance from the edge, I never took my eyes off of the creature until I was at least thirty yards away and up the sheer side over the water. Then, curiosity got the better of me.

I faced forward and took several long and hard running steps away to gain almost double the distance in a few seconds. Then I stopped and whipped right back around to look into the water. Originally, the nightmare never moved from its original spot as if it was still invisible. Now, it was a vaguely blurred alien predator dropping back to the bottom of the river while stretching out toward the vibrations I had sent out.

When I finally found its solid white head again, it was completely still with all orifices closed only a few yards above the riverbed. Stretched out as far as I had been a few seconds ago almost as quickly as I was. If I had tried to outright flee upstream, the current would have only brought my scent to it when I was finally dumb enough to reenter.

Suddenly, a short ring sounded in my head and an electronically neutral voice suddenly says, "Survival Suit and host have developed heightened awareness for hidden predators, Survival Suit 3295743 will now detect danger and alert defensively."

As soon as the message was delivered, the thick meshing around my neck and shoulders suddenly came alive with rippling and stretching. In the space of a few short seconds, my suit grew out a tight fitting mesh helmet and mask with filament thin wiring over my eyes. I could see fairly well but I doubted it would have any effect underwater.

Too busy to care and believing my best option to deal with the nightmare was to continue upstream, I immediately started running once again upstream.

Fully aware of the fact that the eel was keeping pace with me, I kept track of the time and distance I traveled and stopped every minute when I was nearing the next curve in the river. This first's embankment was more solid in that it was rubbled stone from a metamorphic wall leaning out into the jungle. The shifting of different rocks could be used in the nightmare's advantage, but what I was looking for was not a place to fight the nightmare that was still vaguely coiled at the bottom of the river when I stopped.

My next stop was a few dozen yards after the next curve, this was another clay embankment of solid soil but no matter how hard I looked I did not see another nightmare. However, the nightmare following me took its time slowly inching around this curve after sensing my stop. It probably expected another predator to be in this area.

Like I did.

Remembering that it used to be three days in which the human body could go without water, I decided to settle in for the long haul and retreat 'loudly' back into the trees. After a dozen heavy strides, I decided to stop and wait while resting in the corner of two narrow root walls. Now that I had no choice but to pass time and had 'discovered' something about the suit, it was time to do some self-study.

At first I just wanted to figure out how to deactivate and activate the helmet on my own so I started feeling around the thick mesh collar around my neck. When there were no reactions I could not help but grumble about removing the helmet only for the helmet to suddenly recede back into the collar. Checking to see if it was voice activated, I say, "Helmet, on."

Just like that the same protective headgear as before stretched up around my head. Because the alarm and messages were all transmitted inside my head, I wondered if the suit could also respond in such a way. So, I thought as hard as I could, HELMET, OFF.

The helmet then responded as fluidly as it had when I spoke to put it on. This raised numerous questions about what this suit was made of and how it was connected to me. However, there was one important part that worried me.

The voice called me the suit's host and its literal product number seemed exactly like the number the first voice had used when I killed the cricket. There was a joke about this sort of thing in movies and on TV, 'what was wearing who'. I was now honestly worried as I was reminded of the stories that involved lines like that.

Pushing that aside, I had original been told that this suit was a transforming and conforming all-purpose tool. Bearing that in mind, I held up my right hand and 'tested the connection' by mentally raising my helmet. After the helmet finished forming I directed my attention to my index finger and tried hard to think of a short and slightly curving claw. Almost like magic, the outer layers of mes loosened and stretched out to twist and fold into my desired shape.

The process of making a claw for the first time took about as long as making my helmet, but after a few trials and errors involving all of my fingers and thumb it only took about a second to create a single claw. All of them at once only took two or three which was almost negligible. The surface of the root walls around me were chipped and pitted and torn in several patches from testing the claws' capacities.

Next I decided to resolve the minor issue I had been facing for the past hour or so.

Holding one of the beesquito mouth tubes to my waist, I will my suit to grip onto it and then secure it in place. Coming up with a good sheath and other forms of carriage took several minutes, but after another ten minutes of practicing I could almost comfortably 'sheathe' or compile weapons for use and transport about my upper and lower body.

All of the stingers still containing dried and wet remains of venom were work across my back like a quiver of giant arrows. The mouth tubes, however, were sheathed at either side of my waist and across my lower back. The pair of undamaged beesquito wings I carried were intended to be attached to my feet for flippers but it would still be a while before I used them.

For now, they were loosely attached to the back of my upper arms so their roots extended past my elbows as I used my new claws and a pair of small spikes on my knees to slowly scale up the tree I was hiding under. When I reached about fifteen feet from the ground I decided to stop and look down. Even though my mind itself did not seem to have changed very much, I felt like I could use my instinctive response to heights to gauge my current strength.

Much to my joy it really did not seem like the ground was that far away even though I was almost three times my height above the ground. Picking a relatively clear patch of ground nearby, I pull up sharply to loosen my claws and then push out away from the tree. Even though I pushed myself downward which would increase my speed, I still landed easily enough.

I barely even had to bend one knee to control my weight and balance, but that was mostly due to the thick carpet of jungle mulch. Going for gold with my next test, I climb a neighboring tree to reach a low hanging branch a little more than thirty feet above where I had originally landed. Using that target to compare the results, I loosely hang from the branch and simply let go.

Probably because this new body was only about a day old I could roughly feel a difference in fall time. Originally, there was a brief instant in which my body did not register the release of my hands and just drifted an inch downward. Then, half a second later, I started falling for real but it was not until half of the way down that the falling speed actually felt normal.

Fifteen feet above the ground felt more like I had just jumped as high as I could and dropped while playing basketball or something. When I hit the ground felt only a little harder than if I had caught the rim and dropped. It felt like what would happen if I 'carefully' stepped off the rim of the goal to land on a gymnastics mat.

That, of course, was still enough to end up stuck in bed the next day if a normal person was not careful.

I had to bend both knees to catch myself and my feet dug out the dense mulch underneath, but I stayed standing upright and did not experience any real discomfort. If there was anything discomforting, it was the natural shock that both of my legs were still intact. With my feet originally about ten yards above the ground, there was no longer any way to simply attribute this to the soft landscape.