Drip. Drop. Rain fell. A soft patter. A gentle shower. How long had it been? Girls appeared from all around, opening mouths to drink the rain, hunting those who did, and waiting to scavenge the carcasses. There were as many ways of living as there were Girls.
The forest was a place of bounty for them. The forest itself was made of Girls — the ones who’d pulled a rare card called Chloroplast and couldn’t be bothered to move around anymore. The Girls who stopped moving soon lost the ability to communicate with other souls. Action kept the mind clear and thus kept the flesh from corrupting the mind.
Thud. Thud. A far-off sound. The Girls used whatever sensory methods they had to detect it, and fled. Anything capable of making a noise like that was cause to skedaddle. Valor was for fools. Survival was all that mattered.
A massive Girl appeared. Her hardened skin was covered with scales and she had four legs, with a spiral horn-like shell on her head. Anyone who didn’t know better might mistake it for a magnificent crest.
This was Ganapati. The form Ganapati had taken for life on land. She was ten times larger than she’d been in the ocean. How had she become so large? The secret lay in the crest. She did not wear that for style alone. It was an important trick to make such a large body stand upright. Ammonoidea and Nautilus have similar spiral shells. These function as a ballast, controlling their rising and sinking via the absorption of water. Ganapati’s crest served as ballast, too. But in place of water, it used gas.
Girls without an endoskeleton couldn’t grow that large on land — they’d be crushed by their own weight. Even supported by an endoskeleton, you’d run out of space to keep the organs. To overcome this dilemma, she’d implemented this ballast tank. The tank was filled with pure hydrogen. Hydrogen was the lightest gas in the universe. So light that it made her heavy body that much lighter. Her body was no longer being crushed under her own weight. No matter how large she got, it never stopped her moving about. This was the ideal diet plan.
Naturally, hydrogen does not exist in nature. Making it took a great deal of effort. This was where Vayu came in. Her current form was drastically different from what it had once been. She no longer had eyes. She no longer needed any sensory organ cards, so she’d cleared them all from her deck. In their place, she’d enhanced her electric organs. On the old Vayu, it had looked like Pinocchio’s nose, but now it was a significant portion of her total bulk. She looked like a snake with no eyes. A long, thick torso. A slight swelling at one end, where her head was. But this impression was misleading. What looked like a torso was actually her nose — the organ that generated electricity. Thousands upon millions upon billions of electrocytes were all bundled together. The voltage each generated was insignificant, but with this many together she could produce a significant electrical discharge.
And what was that electricity used for? Making oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen was the main thing they needed, and hydrogen was just a byproduct. When Vayu had still been in the water, she had been trying for the cards she needed to evolve lungs. But all she found were cards that grew her electrocytes, leaving her with no choice but to evolve her electric organs and adapt them for use on land. High purity oxygen was vital for survival on land without lungs. The way to make oxygen was to apply electrolysis to water. 2 H₂O→2 H₂ + O₂ — a simple chemical equation. Fortunately, water was plentiful. On the lower side of Vayu’s electric organ were swellings covered in hairy protuberances. Those were her electrolysis organs. The hairs drew moisture up, sending it straight to them. The oxygen generated was absorbed by the overhanging curtain sticking out of her sides — the gills she’d developed. This way, even without any water flow, her gills received enough to breathe.
At first, she was discarding the hydrogen, but by teaming up, Vayu and Ganapati had found a way to make more efficient use of it. Vayu’s body was coiled up inside Ganapati’s spiral shell, and the hydrogen she released made Ganapati’s body lighter.
As they pulled from the gacha, they found even better uses for the hydrogen. Ganapati acquired nozzles — the kind you stick into prey and use like a straw to drink their blood. She could use these to eject hydrogen, then use some teeth at the tips like a flint, turning them into flamethrowers. This was pretty powerful.
Meanwhile, Youko and Dyaus hadn’t changed that much. Arthropods like the two of them didn’t require major changes to move onto land. Dyaus just turned her fins into wings and learned to fly. Youko had Dyaus carry her around. She would lie on her back, and both of them would wrap their limbs around the other’s torso, and then Dyaus would take off. Youko was responsible for attacking. Her gacha pulls had made her very good at stretching her neck out. She had a long neck folded many times like origami, and she could rapidly extend it like a robotic arm, snatching prey off the ground with her mandibles. With the cnidocytes equipped, poison rapidly spread through her prey’s bodies. This method was made possible by a protein called resilin. Resilin was an extremely elastic rubbery material, able to return to its original shape with minimal energy loss. When it had first popped out of the gacha she hadn’t been sure what to make of it, but after reading the explanation she soon realized just how versatile a card it really was.