Procedural Memory

Not giving the creature a chance to adapt to my new form, I swung my katana at its neck. Of course, things wouldn’t be so straightforward. A metal collar emerged on its skin to block the slash of the blade. The clank reverberated in my mind, and the echo brought about a hint of despair. Killing the creature might be even more difficult than I thought.

I attempted to slice the creature from the top side, but it produced a helmet from its skin to protect its skull. And thus, with another clank, the creature remained unharmed.

Hopping backwards a few steps, I saw a movement at the edge of my vision. Lyla was drawing her bow. Incredibly, she had recovered completely from the fatal injury, leaving only dry blood at the site.

To avoid being hit by stray arrows (which was likely), I stepped aside to give Lyla the line of sight she needed. She fired an arrow right at the creature’s stomach, and it chose not to block the projectile.

Although it was impressive for Lyla to land her first shot, the arrow merely sank into the target’s flesh, inflicting no damage to it at all. Was that a taunt? Or maybe there were restrictions on the transformation.

“Lyla, keep it busy for a moment.” I cried in an unexpectedly low-pitched voice. Oh, right, I was still a samurai.

Lyla shot out one arrow after another, thanks to the endless stream of arrows from her magic quiver. “I’m already doing that!” She cried.

The creature let some of the incoming arrows pierce its flesh, while assembling a partial metallic chest plate to block the others. It attempted to advance toward Lyla, but the barrage of arrows kept it at bay. Even without dealing damage, the projectile dug into the body of the creature, disrupting its movement and balance. Lyla’s firing speed was so impressive that I wondered how she would fare in FPS games.

I took the chance to retreat beside Lyla. Her cover fire gave me a chance to collect myself and prepare for the next move. I closed my eyes to let my imagination blossom, a scene of dandelions and daisies sprouting from the cracks of my armor. Colorful and in full bloom, but to a certain point, my focus waned, and the imagery of my mind’s eye wavered.

My transformation ended up with fewer flowers than in my imagination; some of them looked half-melted, like wax on a summer day. The result of the experiment confirmed my speculation that complex imagery could make the transformation unstable. It was simple to maintain the imagery of a samurai that I had seen dozens of times on television, but not if I chose to add flowers all over. The creature might face the same issue, but the next question would be: why didn’t it cover its whole body with metal plating?

There was no time to ponder it further, because the creature was about to reach Lyla and me. I let the flowers melt back into my body, retracted my blade into my skin, and morphed back into my default child body, all to simplify my form for what I was about to do next. I imagined the biggest metal fist I could manage.

The fist manifested in the blink of an eye, and I wasted no time slamming it into the creature. Clank! The fist shattered upon contact, as if it were made of glass. I leapt back, giving Lyla the chance to cover me with a few more arrows. The pieces of my fist dissolved into dust, and my hand regrew in its normal form.

The size of the metal weapon that I generated seemed to be related to how brittle it had become. That explained the small-scale and incomplete metal defense that the creature employed. It must have been replicating the armor that it had seen, but only partially to ensure that its defense would not break easily.

“Let’s run away,” I suggested to Lyla. Lyla glanced at the advancing creature and replied with a curt nod. As the creature was about to charge at us, I morphed my fist into a spiked shield. The creature crashed right onto it and let the spikes skewer its body.

I didn’t expect the spike to deal much damage to it, but a moment of diversion was all we needed. Lyla reached for the main door, but we should have known that escape would not be easy.

Plant roots burst out of the ground and rushed to seal the door. There was nothing Lyla could do but gawk at the obstacle before her. The inner voice of the creature warned me ahead of time that it was about to command the plants to stop us from fleeing, but I didn’t realize this was what it meant. Normally, biology wouldn’t allow plants to be controlled like this.

“Is that magic?” I asked while barely keeping the creature at bay with the shield.

“Yes, the shapeshifting is magic,” Lyla answered with something completely irrelevant. I was obviously asking about the sudden emergence of the plant roots.

The creature rapidly slashed at my neck, each attack blocked by metal plates I generated, a trick I copied from it. Its main body remained pinned behind the shield. I thought it would escape by morphing its shape into something else, but it didn’t do so. It seemed hyper-focused on chopping my head off, so Lyla might have been right about the way to kill a shifter.

Despite its ingenious deceptions, the shifter had incredibly straightforward combat strategies. In the end, it still behaved like a wild animal. It didn’t have an optimized combat form or any traps set in the building.

But actual intelligence mattered little at the moment; what mattered more was who could wield their powers better. And so far, I had been forced to stay on the defensive.

“How do you use magic?” I asked.

“Not a good time to ask this,” she replied, hacking at the roots with her dagger.

“I need the answer to get us out.”

She took a deep breath. “You understand it to use it.” The buildup towards a useful answer fell flat just like that. I was so close to forgetting how frustrating conversations with Lyla could get.

Then, an idea floated into my consciousness. And I allocate some of my attention to the depths of my sensations, searching for any unfamiliarity that could lurk, all the while thinking about removing the giant roots.

My gamble paid off after catching the slightest hint of a strange proprioceptive feedback, similar to what one might feel if they imagined themselves moving an additional third arm. My mind reached out and gripped onto it, not letting it slip away, forcing it out into the limelight of my inner world.

Further along in pursuing this feeling, I became in sync with the root system; moving them was as natural as moving my body. I used the instincts I had inherited from the creature to hijack the roots.

“Lyla, run!” I yelled. Straining every ounce of my concentration, I forced the roots to slither in retreat underground. The bumpy surface of the door was once again visible to us, a symbol of our freedom. I couldn’t enjoy any of it, too busy dividing my attention between holding back the roots and the relentless attacks from the creature’s nails.

A loud bang resounded, followed by a crunch, as Lyla crashed through the door. I retracted the spikes and shoved the creature backwards with my shield hand. The unexpected action caught it off guard, and its slight backward movement was a substantial opening for me to dash out of the door.

What I didn’t expect was how quickly it reacted, and it attacked me with a root I didn’t sense. The sturdy cable of nature grabbed hold of my leg, keeping me in place.

I used my shield to block the repetitive attacks from the creature, while trying to morph my leg to slip out of the root, but the root only grew tighter and dug into my flesh. No matter how I commanded my leg to change form, it didn’t react. I then ordered my leg to detach itself, but nothing happened.

I glimpsed Lyla’s slender figure, back against one of the moons. She looked at me helplessly. “Burn this place down! Do it!” I yelled.

That shout shook her into action, and she vanished from my view without a word.

Now my focus could return to the flurry of attacks before me. And so, I counterattacked with a single root. The root popped up from behind the creature and wrapped around it.

The creature was not smart enough to expect plagiarism, nor was it smart enough to escape. We were in a deadlock, both constrained by roots, both trying to undo their root shackles, both steadying the root that was trapping the opponent, both filled with distressing thoughts. The dichotomy of hunter and prey dissolved, leaving only two parties wishing to survive through the ordeal.

Its thoughts revealed much about its mental state. There were frantic cries that could only manifest as low hums that were not at all similar to any sound humans could make, mounting fear that could not reach its face to cumulate into an expression, and also the complete absence of reflection or any need to make sense of the panic.

The alien thought pattern prompted me to shut out my sympathy, reiterating to myself that the being before me was nothing but a monster, not to be reasoned with. All it could do was struggle mindlessly; all it could do was deceive its prey long enough to eat them; all it could do was mimic form and behavior. A mere parrot. No flexibility or intelligence to negotiate.

Smoke drifted in from the open doorway, carried by the callous wind, not reading the tension in the room, playfully delivering the excitement of a fire started somewhere nearby. A slight glow became more noticeable outside, competing against the many moons to be the brightest in the night.

The smell all but confirmed it: that Lyla had started a fire as I asked her to. Then, not long after, traces of the fire peeked in from the two guest rooms behind the creature, and they spread rapidly to engulf everything in its path.

The creature sensed it too, the danger beyond its field of vision. It grew more frantic, like a mouse that had fallen into a water bucket, thrashing about, but no closer to escaping.

With the shield between the two of us to hide my actions, I sawed off my captured leg with the katana in my hand. A sense of horror and uncanniness invaded me; a languid murmur begged me to stop. But the cut did not hurt, because I had retracted my nerves before this.

The root maintained its grip on my severed leg, and I grew a new one back. The creature didn’t know I was free. After all, I was monitoring its thoughts, how it fell into self-preservation, no longer interested in fighting me.

It would probably flee if I let it go. However, I could not afford to do that, because after its escape, it would still prey on humans. It could not help it; the temptation of its instincts was what it had to do to survive.

As quickly as I could, I reverted my shield hand to normal while dashing to the door. Since I was still taking the form of a warrior, the brief sprint was not a problem for me. It was too late when the creature noticed me, and I sealed the door with roots.

It had not given up; any wild animals would struggle to the end, as the boar did. I could feel it fighting for control of the roots. Its mind screamed desperately, more and more intensely. And the pain, I could feel its pain, while the fire spread along the wooden house to where it should be. I took a few steps back and fell onto the damp grass.

The pain grew more intense. It was the pain of being burnt alive. Deafening screams echoed in my head. Not human screams, but real screams nonetheless. It was more visceral than the feral and bumbling sound I had experienced with the boar.

I gripped the sides of my head, trying to suppress the pain. No longer could I maintain my form as a samurai warrior; I morphed back to the ten-year-old body I had in this world. The voices grew incoherent, and I could no longer hear anything but a ringing that amplified as time went on until I felt my head was about to burst.

The sound was the first to go. I couldn’t hear the flames anymore. Then, everything was cut to a dark silence.