[KoJ] Chapter 97: Growth Fixation

The Other Side feels foreign.

By all means, I’ve spent more time here than back on the surface, yet… it is no longer so familiar. The endless ocean of churning gravel is isolating. Not any more than it used to be, but somehow the sensation is more present than ever.

There is no turning back. Despite the sparsity of landmarks, its lack of sapient presence is exactly what I want.

Massive dunes of earth fold away beneath me as I shift between flight and slithering along the ground. At full size, my weight is more than enough to collapse the flowing stone, leaving a wide, trailing pit in my wake.

I’m done with the sapients of the surface. My decision to remove my only path back was impulsive, but it is one I stand by. Long gone is the curiosity I had towards the people and their creations. Destroyed by a single act.

In all my life, even long before I gained sapience of my own, the Other Side was a place of fear. It was a devastating landscape to be avoided at any cost. Death was all but a certainty.

Ironic that it is now my refuge.

That wasn’t to say the Other Side wasn’t dangerous. Even now, as I wallow in my own misery, I avoid the tremors of Titans. A network of distortions expands around me, stretching my sight long beyond its limit; can’t have any other threats sneak up on me.

Titans were still the supreme apexes of this land, and no matter how determined I am to hunt them, I am not yet ready. Instead, I need to return to where I was. I need to hunt down as many of the pseudo Titans. Hunt, kill, and consume. The strength permeating their bodies will become mine, and I shall grow. Eventually, my size will be great enough to challenge the Titans.

I have no illusions of how difficult and time consuming this will be… but I have nothing else to live for.

No longer can I be picky about my hunts. I cannot stub any elementals for the sake of annoyance, as it may be days before I come across more prey. If a beast is a challenge, then so be it. I will need all the experience I can get when I finally reach the realm of Titans.

And I will reach them. No matter how long it takes.

My first target makes itself known without any need for me to hunt it down. A spider about half my size explodes from the shifting sands as my tail whips along the surface. Webbing engulfs my scales. Flowing through a narrow bend, I clean off the likely constricting material.

The eight legged beast takes one look at my freed form, and understands it has no chance. My tongue darts out and I taste its fear. It wastes no time trying to dig beneath the surface again, yet I am hardly about to give it the chance.

I am very familiar with hunting creatures larger than myself, but facing this smaller arachnid, I do not show any lenience. Why would I make the same mistake I’ve seen so many others have? In so many of my past hunts, prey rarely expends all their energy to fend me off at the start when they consider me too small to be worth the effort.

My body crashes into the ground. A wave of earth rolls outward, flowing over the surface like the writhing water of the surface’s seas. My fangs crack shell, and sink into the flesh. The creature squirms. Its legs scrape out the edges of my jaw, but it can do nothing to stop its coming death.

Especially when my bends slide down its legs and disable them entirely.

There is a loud crack in my jaw, and a second later the arachnid falls down my gullet. It struggles. Futile. The taste of webbing overwhelms the flavour of spider blood. Numbing, but I’m no longer eating for hunger or satisfaction. Only growth matters.

I can still feel the creature struggling as I continue on to the next hunt. My stomach is left to deal the final death toll. At least it no longer stretches my body. Despite being smaller than myself, the spider was still twice as wide.

It grows still long before my next meal. Said feast, and each that follow, do the same. Where once, a creature not killed before swallowing would only disturb my stomach, it now barely poses a concern. The beasts I hunt and battle are greater than any in the past, but each I consume only empowers me. The strength of my organs and the capabilities of my personal spatial fabric grow to the point that once I’ve eaten them, there is no escape.

Beyond my jaws is an inescapable void.

Of course, not all creatures live as they are consumed. I try to end their suffering with a crunch of my fangs, but it is not always enough. Many creatures at this massive size are very good at clinging at their life, no matter how beaten and destroyed their bodies become; I am no different.

The days gradually pass. One after the other, cycles turn with the warm sun overhead coming again and again. My life becomes nothing more than an endless pursuit. The only times I stop is to swallow meals too large for my own jaws, and when my body demands rest.

Not that I need to sleep often.

Through each difficulty that comes, I force myself to remember Scia. Only her memory keeps me going. She is the reason I must continue. If I don’t succeed… if I can’t surpass each limitation this world has placed on me, I can never see her again. Her steadfast presence allows me to fight through all the pain, all the exhaustion that would otherwise demand I stop. Give up.

It would be so easy to allow my mind to fade into the numb of the hunt. Forcing my body through such difficulties day after day, it is all too tempting to fall into familiarity. After a certain point, the battles become easier. I could simple continue as I am, but even that wouldn’t be enough to reach the Titans.

The sheer gap between large beasts and the natural forces that are the Titans is too wide to surpass just by hunting the former.

There is a reason sapients have taken control of so much land on the surface, despite their physical weakness. Trickery and cunning is as important as power. With each hunt I take, I keep my mind flexible. Not only do I attempt whatever strategy I can think of to succeed and take down beasts stronger than myself, but I keep alert to their own attempts on me.

As I gradually take on greater existences, intelligence naturally rises. To reach such heights, some form of cunning is required. So many of those that end up in my stomach likely are as capable of communication as I, but the thought is nothing but a distraction.

There is one simple fact of the Other Side. Everything is an enemy. Even if two sides can communicate, they would never settle without either a fight, or one side fleeing for their life.

I am no different. I need the power stored in their flesh.

And if I intend to reach the realm of Titans this century, I need an impossibly immense quantity of that flesh. To do so, I work on my distortions. Challenging the fabric as I would any other muscle, it grows. Soon enough, I can create dozens of rifts large enough to encapsulate my full-size body, while also reaching almost a hundred kilometres in each direction.

The better I get, the less time between each hunt. At some point, I find myself attacking my next prey before my previous has fully reached my stomach. Battles an entire nation apart, yet only seconds between them.

Months pass. I forget the feeling of an empty stomach.

The spatial ripples permeating the sky for half each day becomes ever so slightly more clear. In the times when prey doesn’t make itself blatantly obvious, or I have to hide from the mighty beings that could end my existence with the odd swipe of a claw, I spend deciphering the details that light hides.

Despite knowing it should be possible because of how many creatures see this way, I’m surprised when it actually gives results.

It is nothing like my own vision, and it takes a lot of effort to decipher the information of those ripples, but I learnt to read light. Immediately, it becomes invaluable. I doubt I perceive it the same way as most other species, but now I can detect Titans on the horizon without sound or tremors.

I can only perceive intensity for now, but that alone is not something I would ever give up. After speaking with sapients, I know there is another aspect, colour, but trying to keep the image straight is already incredibly difficult. My centuries of path plotting mind twisters does help in that regard, so it is only a matter of time.

Still doesn’t beat True Sight. Who would want to be almost blind for half the day?

The addition of light vision has unveiled a few things that I took for granted until now. First of which, there truly isn’t a ‘ceiling’ to the surface. It was almost impossible to comprehend at first, but the sun was an infinitely distant source of light. Not even passing through a rift would change its position in the sky; only time. No matter how I tried to wrap my head around it, the sky cavern had to be so immensely large that it was more apt to call it nothing.

Didn’t help that as soon as I became more sensitive to the light, small dots at night seem even more impossibly distant. However that is possible.

The other major revelation is the Titan Alps. I’ve heard them spoken of in the sapient lands, and have seen the ever rising inclination of land, but never could I have comprehended just how large it is. Somehow… it made Titans seem small. While Titans would sometimes peek over the horizon, the Alps overwhelmed it. And not by a small margin. Where a Titan, or a Titan-sized dune of gravel might lift off the line that made the horizon by a small amount, the Alps rise a dozen times that. They take up a quarter of the sky… and the horizon is still visible before it.

But no matter how shockingly massive it is, that changes nothing about my task. Under the Titan Alps’ looming presence, I continue my hunt. More cycles pass.

Each day, I grow more. I shed more often than ever before; my scales adapt to the new size and toss the old layer. It tastes horrid, but I can’t waste any source of energy. I swallow my shed skin.

One day, it reaches the point where I don’t even know how large I’ve become. Most of my prey slides down my throat without problem. I have once again reached the point where I am an apex amongst prey.

Only when I come across a lynx do I finally pause. There is no way for me to tell if  it’s the same size as the creature that caused Scia’s death, but even if it’s close, the creature’s diminutive size is startling.

I can fit the entire beast within my jaw.

Of course, the creature doesn’t control diamond as the last one, and my immediate thought is that it isn’t close to that being’s strength. The quartz it unleashed in my mouth was annoying, but it died quickly.

But following that hunt, I began to notice just how everything seemed so much smaller. While the Titans were as massive as ever, everything else was tiny. Where I usually had to rely on constriction and my faster, smaller size to fight, I’m now the largest non-Titan around. As a serpent, few things smaller than myself pose a threat. Then there is the Titan bones; the massive shards that once dwarfed everything… they now only seem somewhat large.

Then, one day, instead of ignoring me after I slip through the fabric and out of a Titan’s sight, the giant decided I was worth chasing down. The massive, lumbering feet shake the air with each step. Despite a spatial rift carrying me more than a dozen kilometres, the huge hyena reached me in a second. Earth split. Tsunamis of rock crashed in all directions around each leg.

I am no longer small enough to be considered unworthy of their attention.

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Might have gone through this section a bit too quick, but I didn't really feel like going through ten chaps or something on basic fights. Besides, we get to some of the cool stuff sooner skipping time like this.

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