Failure! Failure! Failure! Every pull she did came up empty.
Behind Youko, a massive whirlpool swirled. Never before had the word massive seemed like such an understatement. The scale of the whirlpool was beyond the capacity of language.
It was large enough for several small planets to fit inside. In front of this whirlpool was a section of space painted pitch black. It was a perfect rectangle, like it had been sliced out with a knife. This was what had brought Youko here. It was the ultimate goal. The Girls gacha.
Youko was on a gas giant a long way from the planet where her second life had started. She’d survived this world for twenty-four more years than her first life had lasted. She’d stopped counting the days with any precision a long time ago. It was growing difficult for her to remember what it had been like to have a body she couldn’t alter as she pleased.
The day Ganapati died, and she’d killed Dyaus, Youko and Vayu became one. They’d transformed themselves with the points gained from eating the train Girl, Dyaus, and Ganapati. The first thing she’d done was make Vayu part of her own body. Vayu had no eyes or nose and could only survive inside another Girl. To allow that, she’d made her own body larger, creating space for Vayu inside her body cavity.
Youko made herself a myriapod — like a mukade. Out of all the arthropods, this form was most suited for larger sizes. She could survive the increase in size without fundamentally changing the construction of her body. It allowed her to increase her height without the ratio between mass and surface area becoming fatal and suffocating her. She was just increasing the number of segments, the simplest method of making herself larger. And the larger she got the more legs she had and the stronger and faster she was.
Giant mukade Youko briefly made a forest her territory, but soon realized this did not allow her to demonstrate her full potential. There were too many obstructions, and her body was constantly getting tangled up in them. Any environment with lots of other Girls left segments of her body without specialized defense mechanisms the target of frequent attacks. She split her brain across several segments as a countermeasure, but this didn’t entirely resolve the risk of incurring fatal damage.
For lack of better options, Youko started flying. In the air, she didn’t have to worry about any Girls attacking her flanks. She stretched membranes between her legs, gliding. Without bird-like wings, keeping herself aloft required propellent. This was the hydrogen Vayu produced. Rather than make a new organ to serve as an engine, she simply made the tail segment explode to launch herself.
In time, she no longer needed to explode herself. She leveled up her excretory tubes into a single long, sturdy tube. Villus inside the tube had warts stuffed with fuel (a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen) and exploding these warts one after another formed her new engine.
This system proved to have other applications. By pointing her anus at the sky, she could turn herself into a giant cannon. Boasting an extremely high launch speed, the mukade cannon used a series of interior explosions to increase projectile velocity. It was the same principle as multistage rocket propulsion. All she had to do was make pits inside her excretory tube lined with explosive warts so that they wouldn’t interfere with the trajectory of the projectile.
The projectiles evolved, too. At first she soaked excrement in explosive fluids and blew that up, but then learned to use pieces of Vayu instead. Vayu’s electric organs could be adapted into a powerful attack mechanism — electromagnetic pulse bombs. Normally, EMPs release a burst of electromagnetic energy to destroy electronic devices, but they’d adapted this to affect brains as well, by using an EMP frequency that targeted the neuron.
When she fired an EMP bomb from her anus, blanketing an area, the Girls in range were driven mad. It was quite easy to eat mad Girls. She just flew around stretching out her head and snatching them up with her mandibles. Naturally, as a side effect, Youko herself became somewhat mad. But she didn’t mind being a little insane as long as she could grant Vayu’s wish.
Youko looked for the next plan. She had to kill a lot more Girls. She had to kill and eat them. What could help accomplish that? Knowledge from her past life helped here. She remembered a thing called a nuclear bomb. She just had to make one of those.
But if she was going to make a nuclear bomb, she would need to protect herself and Vayu from it. She lined their genes with a lead coating, shielding them from harmful radiation, then burrowed deep in the ground, mining uranium — eating and refining it. As further protection against nuclear disaster, she made a number of additional brains, connecting them wirelessly. These splinter brains monitored the internal reactor she had growing in her guts like a tumor. Her hard work paid off, and she completed the nuclear bomb. The nuclear detonation also caused an EMP blast — two birds with one stone.
By detonating the nuclear bomb, she was also able to go to outer space. The principle was simple. She simply placed herself above the bomb and set it off. The shockwave sent her flying. That was it! A single big nuclear blast would have torn her body to pieces, but by detonating a number of small bombs at intervals her ascension was quite smooth. In space, her segmented construction came in handy again. She could explode her body parts, propelling herself around. There were already quite a lot of Girls living out here. Even an outfit gacha. This helped Youko alter herself further.
“Vayu, you’ll see Sensei again soon,” she said.
No answer came. Living as a lump of flesh with no eyes or nose had taken its toll. The only thing she ever heard from Vayu these days was the occasional whisper. “Sensei... Sensei...”
Youko’s flesh grew even larger. Her total length might have been over five kilometers. She resembled a wingless dragonfly or a skeletal fish. Her entire body was covered in a shell made of ceramic woven with carbon filaments. This protected her from the vacuum of space and from radiation.
Her tail was a skirt-shaped thruster. In a circle around it were a number of wings. These were not designed for flight; they were heat sinks. Their function was to cool the surplus heat generated by the nuclear fusion used to propel herself forward.
The nuclear fusion was created with concentrated laser beams. Fuel ejected from the thruster would be struck by the countless laser emission organs that lined the hem of the skirt, the beams surrounding the fuel from all directions. The beams applied so much pressure to the fuel that fusion occurred.
The fuel was liquid hydrogen coated in an oil film. The organs that ejected the fuel were based on the spinnerets spiders used. But instead of secreting silk, they secreted oils, coating the liquid hydrogen as it was transported through her body. In gravity-less environments this created near perfect spheres.
The thruster grew more and more narrow towards the top, becoming a segmented rod. This went on for a bit before reaching the head. It was a head like a giant hornet, except with four eyes. Two giant compound fore-eyes covered a quarter of the face, and two smaller compound eyes faced her rear. On the end of her face was a mouth, pursed like a caricature, the mandibles extending from that. The pursed mouth was constructed like an airlock, protecting her innards from the vacuum.
Youko spent her days like any other Girl who lived in outer space. She fought, killed, and ate. Delicate control over the water vapor generated by the surplus heat of the fusion allowed her to approach the other Girls, grip them with her mandibles, stab them with her mouth, and slurp up their flesh. She did it all for Vayu. So she could be reunited with Sensei.