That left only red and yellow unopened.

  Justin considered both as he held them before him.

  If he thought about it logically, any laboratory that could have manufactured these things would have been incentivised to make them as effective per their cost as possible, biological weapons or not.

  The blue slime had been effective in shock absorption, but its quality of defense was still under par when compared to the offensive ability of the green’s acid. Yet even if their creators desired to make an army of only the best, they had still clearly been constrained by money and resources, or at the very least by time.

  So by that logic, while blue was less potent than green, they were likely cheaper to produce. Following that, red was probably more potent than green, and yellow more still.

  This was all merely based on the implications brought upon by scarcity, but that in itself might have even been misleading.

  The quantities themselves could have been altered by improper storage or Justin’s intrusion into the vault, or there might have been more stored elsewhere in the ship before whatever event had caused it to be buried so deep into the earth.

  It also remained a possibility that the quantities were misleading for another reason. More expensive didn’t always equate to something being better. Especially in an experimental setting. Life forms with innate abilities weren’t always grouped in such standardized ways.

  Perhaps yellow was just as dangerous to Justin as blue, but for a different reason that required different resources to manufacture, hence the relative scarcity.

  But even after surmising as much, all Justin really knew was that he knew nothing for sure. He wouldn’t get anywhere without opening the remaining vials.

  So just as he had done before, Justin made a barricade around the next vial before cracking it open. This one was red, as he had superstitiously chosen, and was loudly snapped open before the canister’s contents burst out across the rock..

  CRACK

  GLOMP

  A gush of scarlet erupted from the broken vial and spilled out onto the rough rock face.

  It bore no semblance to the previous vial specimens, in that it was almost completely liquid.

  Justin watched as the stringy mixture spread out rapidly from the eggshell-like vial remains, bumping up against his encirclement of tentacles in a profuse wave.

  Upon contact, the red slime began to show its intelligence much earlier than its priors had.

  By reading what perhaps qualified as body language for a slime, Justin noticed the liquid seemed to consider for a moment that the surface of his body was different from the stone, before it began to envelope his tentacles and coalesce into a yarn-like ball.

  The slime concentrated even further after that into a seamless sphere, before an unaccountable glow of red light began to emanate from its liquid body.

  Justin frowned. He knew it had been blocked from reaching the crystal walls, yet it still looked like it was activating as the other slimes had.

  Unlike the previous times it didn’t seem to be forming an imitation of one of his friends, either. So what was it trying to do?

  Justin got his answer as soon as the air around it began to haze over.

  SHISSSSHHHHH!

  [Health: 6 / 15]

  [Health: 5 / 15]

  [Health: 4 / 15]

  ‘Damn it!’

  Justin gritted his teeth as the creature burned through him.

  Unconsciously, the parts of his tentacles that were still intact were forced loose by the intolerable heat. The slime, which had burned a hole through his flesh, then broke loose past his charred members and fell into the water.

  ‘Fuck! What am I doing?!’

  Justin made a movement to chase after it, before stopping himself.

  Unlike with the acid slime, he wasn’t in the best condition at that moment.

  While there was a high chance that allowing the red slime time to feed on the crystals and grow stronger would be a fatal mistake, the possibility that he would face defeat if he pursued it now was almost certain.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Justin watched with strained eyes as the dim glow of its red body disappeared into the distant waters.

  Justin couldn’t take those odds. Sooner or later he had to admit that he had bitten off more than he could chew, and it had come time to retreat and make a game plan.

  Despite all his faults, he was not above recognizing the need for a tactical retreat, or even a pathetic one.

  Justin looked at the remaining vial in his hand.

  ‘I can’t imagine what will be the first thing it's going to do after feeding, but I have to be prepared for it to come and find me. I have to go somewhere secure while I prepare.’

  After losing sight of it in the water, Justin knew the red slime could have gone anywhere.

  It might very well be making its way toward the surface, but Justin knew there was one place it wouldn’t be.

  …

  After resealing the storage room’s vault door behind him, Justin put the yellow vial back in its case and sighed.

  ‘If that was red, then I’m clearly not ready for whatever this one contains.’

  He had thought that the slimes required a few moments to adapt, but it seemed that had only been true for the blue and green variants. Red had come out of the evolutionary gate sprinting, and had burned a hole through his thick skin before he even realized that it could alter its own body temperature.

  Justin cracked his neck. A habit formed under stress years ago, before he used to launch into missions.

  ‘Maybe I was looking at it wrong. Can’t I make a small cut, an injury under the limit of a health point?’

  While it may have seemed overly simplistic to those without access to the system, health points were more than just a way of telling how injured one was, or how big of a hit they had taken. Once a human transformed into a volta, or a creature into a daemon, so too were parts of their biology selectively changed.

  The change in the composition of their cells and the generation of a new kind of energy was the most eye-catching, but their very vitality would begin to work differently too.

  Justin, already accustomed to this phenomenon, knew that if his health points reached zero he would experience what the system labeled “induced cell death”. It was different from being fatally wounded or contracting a serious illness, and was almost paranormal in a certain light.

  Of course, Justin could still die in any number of ways. The system hadn’t given him invulnerability. Yet voltas or daemons like him could also die from an accumulation of injuries, a shock to their health statistic, all while appearing seemingly very healthy.

  The absence of health points essentially represented the system’s inability to support the body’s function any longer.

  With all that in mind, what Justin wanted to do was make a small cut along his hands that wouldn’t induce a further decrease in health. Fly under the radar of the system, so to speak.

  Such a thing would normally be beyond the skills of a low-level daemon, but Justin had enough confidence that he could do it.

  ‘At least, it should be possible. I’ve only ever seen Harriet pull this off…’

  SHRRRRRRRING!

  Justin poked his right thumb into the back of his opposite hand, slicing across the flat surface cleanly enough so as to not draw too much blood.

  The tough skin there cut about as well as leather, yet after a timid moment he realized his health hadn’t been further decreased.

  ‘Nice!’

  He didn’t have much more health to give, so he had to be extremely careful. Any minute injury could drop him a point, so he only had four such chances to get all of this right. He didn’t have the luxury to wait for regeneration to kick in when that red menace was still out there.

  Justin resumed cutting in a shape around his hand, until he looped back around to where he had started. By now, the back of his hand appeared to have a jagged crater etched out from it, which he was able to cautiously pry off before exhaling.

  ‘Now here is where it all comes into play.’

  Justin focused on the effect of his talent. It wasn’t something he should have had to activate manually, but he had been purposefully trying to not think of any kind of tissue to replace his wound in order to delay the process.

  He needed the whole injury to be affected at once, and it seemed like he had been successful in that so far.

  ‘Now!’

  A series of specifics shot through Justin’s mind all at once. Thanks to the mental gymnastics his race allowed him to perform, he could hold off thinking the subconscious thoughts that would activate his talent until the proper moment.

  When that moment came, Justin’s mind flooded with a series of desired traits.

  A dense structure of hard, overlapping plates. Threads of flexible membrane, highly conductive to regulate thermal variation. Reduced nerve length and quantity. Hollowed and spongy tissue for shock absorption.

  When all of those thoughts flew through his mind, his body reacted instantly. In less than a second, a swollen keloid-mass rose from the back of his left hand where he had skinned the flesh, before unraveling and falling apart in the water. Underneath was revealed to be a pocket of grey-bluish scales, fitted to his imagined specifications in every way.

  As he held it up to the storage room’s light, he admired his body’s handiwork. If he was correct, then the back of his left hand, only a minuscule percentage of his body’s surface area, was now resistant to changes in external temperature and physical trauma, was now lighter and more agile, and required a greater force to feel pain and felt less when it did.

  Finally, Justin had found some measure to account for his weaknesses. This meager scale of hardened flesh now represented in some small way, him beginning to grow past all the opponents he had faced as a daemon so far.

  It was growth. Not just as a daemon, or as a scourge, but as an individual.

  One talent had allowed him the smallest possibility of hope, that his current worries wouldn’t be the end of him, but it also spoke of what seemed like countless more possibilities.

  ‘If I can change my hand, can I do the same thing to my whole body? No, how far can I take it past that?’