Youko expanded her territory, centering it on the gacha she always pulled. The gacha was like an oasis to the Girls. It granted them blessings, yet it was also a battle arena. Anytime multiple Girls gathered together, they’d inevitably start trying to steal each other’s points. The area around the gacha was littered with corpses. Youko used that to her advantage. She’d hide herself in the mud and use her chemoreceptors to tell her when the fighting had subsided. Once the victor had swum away, she’d pop out of the mud and scavenge the leftovers. There were points in those corpses — not a lot, but every bit helped.
By what felt like two weeks since she’d become a Girl, Youko finally got the sight she’d been hoping for. R: Photoreceptors. These were cells scattered across her surface cells that could only detect light and dark, but that was surprisingly useful. Her chemoreceptors were useless anywhere with a current, but light was a versatile sensory medium that could be used under any conditions.
When she leveled her photoreceptors up, she got eyespots — clusters of photoreceptive cells. By making segments of eyespots she was able to get compound eyes containing a number of small eyes. Now she could at last see the view around her.
Sight. This was absolutely revolutionary. Light was the fastest thing in the world. Being able to perceive that light meant grasping the situation before anyone else. All this time she’d only had a rough idea of her world based on changes to chemical density, but now a world of comparatively stunning clarity surrounded her. Trapped within her soul, Youko had been feeling claustrophobic, so she rejoiced at this new freedom.
Sight made exploring easier, too. Youko attached two eyes to the top of her head. She’d crawl along in the mud, her eyes stretched out, observing the world above her. If she saw a large shadow she’d hide in the dirt.
There were a lot of gacha around, in surprising places. She could feel when she was getting closer to a gacha, but she needed to be a certain distance away to sense them, so the only way to find them was to explore. She never found a respiratory gacha, but she managed to finish a respiratory system with some unexpected cards. Feet. Feet were a versatile part that could be branched off into all kinds of organs. The first type Youko got was R: Parapodium. A pair of parapodia sticking out of every segment on her body. They might look like just a bunch of bumps, but they were so much more. By undulating a body with these bumps, she could generate friction to move herself around far faster than before. When she leveled up her parapodia and fused them, she got SR: Phyllopod Feet, which took the parapodia nubs, made them bigger and thinner, and then covered them with more nubs. This generated more friction, making it easier to get around.
She could specialize her legs per body segment. For example, by concentrating sensory organs in the legs by her head they became feelers, while a number of legs near the front of her became gills. She called them gills, but they were of extremely simple construction. She just extended several layers of flimsy flesh and folded them several times like origami. Then she concentrated capillaries inside them and let cutaneous respiration do its thing. The folded sections increased the overall surface area, allowing her to absorb sufficient oxygen.
Now that she could obtain oxygen efficiently, she could be far more active. Instead of just hiding in the mud, Youko could leap out of it, ambushing other Girls and tearing away pieces of their bodies. To increase her offensive capabilities, she changed two legs into mandibles. By raising the mandibles’ level, they became bigger and thicker. Since she had gills now, she could also cover her entire body with a tough chitin shell.
Youko’s build was becoming formidable. Describing it in terms familiar from her previous life, she looked like a mukade combined with a stag beetle combined with a slug. Her body was made of sturdy, flat, jointed segments, with a pair of soft phyllopod feet sticking out of each segment. Near the front, these feet became longer and more complex, and at the very front they were like a forest growing in all directions. Where the gills were, the bluish color of her blood showed through. A closer look at the gills revealed countless cilia pulsing constantly. On her head were two eye stalks with compound eyes at the tips, twitching this way and that. Just outside the eye stalks were two serrated feelers. But her ultimate trademark were the two massive mandibles, a third of her total body length. There were two joints in each, allowing her to slice like a pair of scissors or stab like a fork. The inside was lined with sharp spikes, and nothing these pierced got off lightly.
Youko had become a dominant force in her area. She was no longer a bottom-tier Girl. This was it. This was the sensation she’d been craving — the feeling that someone acknowledged her, recognized her. It was the sensation that kept her playing mobile games — the satiation of her need for approval.
It felt wonderful. Everyone was looking at her. At last she felt like she had real value.
One day, something happened that did an even better job scratching this itch.
“Yo! You’re Youko, right? You remember me?”
Just hearing the voice echoing in her soul was enough to annoy her. It was the voice of a Girl who’d been stalking her for a while now. She’d know that condescending tone anywhere. It was Dyaus. They’d tried to kill each other once.
“Dyaus! Here for a rematch? I’ll take you on whenever!”
All this approval she was riding had Youko getting a little carried away. She was confident in the body she’d built, but Dyaus had clearly not been slacking off in that department. Like Youko, she was a segmented invertebrate, but rather than scrabbling through the dirt, she could swim. The overall impression was very fish-like. She was teardrop-shaped, like a cicada, with the head at the thicker end. Her head had eight eyes, like you often see on spiders. Two giant compound eyes covered nearly a third of her head, and six smaller eyes were arranged around them. Below her head was a mouth like a long, thin, horizontal vacuum cleaner. Around the mouth were a number of short feelers, like human fingers, presumably to help rip prey off the seafloor.
The legs on her sides had fins attached—long fins like airplane wings that let her wheel around in the water over Youko’s head, like a vulture. Meanwhile, the legs on her belly were feeble things. They probably still qualified as parapodia. She’d probably specialized her deck to allow for swimming. Behind the fins, Youko could see gill-like slots, and inside the slots she caught glimpses of blue string-like organs. The biggest threat was her tail. The further back you went the more keratinized it was, until it became a sharp blade. She must have used this sharp tail to stab her prey and claim their points.