Chapter 3—Gamer of Flesh

The words hovered in front of me, cold and expectant.

[System Message]

Congratulations, [Player Name: ¿?], your Hunger Meter has been reset.

Please select your preferred User Name.

In a flash, everything shifted.

I'd eaten, and I'd gained health. And now, the system was pushing me further down this rabbit hole, asking for a player name, confirming that this was some sort of twisted, fucked up, horrific video game. The realization was both unsettling and strangely comforting. Unsettling because, well, how the fuck did this work? How was the system interacting with my brain to present information in this way?

Was it a neural interface? Telepathic nanomachines? Alien tech? I was a bug larva living inside another creature; the possibilities were endless. And the answers were nowhere to be found, of course. Not yet, at least. But the comfort came from the fact that, in the past, I'd played many games like this. They'd given me a sense of structure and purpose.

A name.

Something I hadn’t thought about since waking in the dark. Did I even still have one? My old name had been lost along with everything else. A blank space in a shredded memory.

But the system wasn’t asking about the past. It wasn’t offering to restore anything. It was demanding; I define myself now.

—Who am I, in this flesh prison?

I considered silence. Rejection. Pretending the question didn’t matter.

But in this world of suffocating meat, it was the first thread of agency I’d been given. A scrap of power in the void.

And in the end, only one truth mattered:

I was a parasite that ate, grew, and consumed to survive. That was who I am now, the person I had to become if I wanted to stay existing.

So I named myself, drawing from that simple truth.

—I’ll take “Nemesis.” Nem, for short. It feels fitting.

The system didn't reply. No error message. No acknowledgment.

Instead, a screen popped up in front of me, a display of statistics in neat rows. At the top was a series of bars that resembled RPG character stats.

[Character Sheet—Player: Nemesis ‘Nem’]

Race: Botfly Larva (Tier 0 Parasite)

Title: None

Stage: Newly Hatched (Age: 2h)

Size: 6.7 cm³ | Growth Limit: 8.1 cm³

HP: 3 / 3

Biomass: 3

STR: 1 | AGI: 2 | VIT: 1 | INT: 3 | WIS: 3 | LCK: ?

Unique Trait: Hive Genesis—Your infections may become permanent extensions of your will.

Racial Ability: Parasitic Implantation—Survive by feeding on and nesting within living hosts.

Active Quest: Don’t get crushed or scratched out of the Warm Dark.

Hunger: Sated.

My thoughts buzzed. It wasn’t just survival anymore. This thing—this system—was treating me like a player in a game. Stats. Traits. Skills waiting to be earned. There is more information available now than there was earlier, which is quite quaint.

That meant… if I played, I could win. Control wasn’t entirely outside my grasp, was it?

Even more surprising was the unique trait that stood out to me. I can create hives of other parasites and control them?

The idea sent a shiver of excitement and dread down my spine. It wasn’t quite mind control, not telepathy. It was more like the ability to infect others and control them as if they were puppets.

Or, at least, that’s how it read to me. In theory. In practice? Who the fuck knew? And when would I have the chance to test it out?

I will save my questions for later. For now, the rest of the status menu was a bit sparse, but it did give me a rough outline of what to expect going forward. I had a growth limit, implying a potential maximum size or stage.

The host shifted around me, a slow, rolling tremor that jostled my body in the dark. My prison was moving. Walking? Hunting? I couldn’t tell, but it was the first time I realized I was riding something much larger than myself.

And then, like a whisper in the back of my skull, new text appeared.

[Skill Unlocked!]

Puppet Strings Lv. 1—You may nudge the behavior of your host by tugging on nerves and muscles. Success chances scale with WIS.

My thoughts spun, trying to parse the implications. A chance to subtly direct the course of the body I was inhabiting, perhaps to better serve my needs or avoid danger. The very idea made a shudder run through me, a ripple that echoed the shifting of the surrounding flesh.

But the possibilities went far beyond that. What could I learn, watching from the safety of my dark womb? What could I manipulate, given time and understanding?

What was I becoming in the belly of the beast?

Threads. Not physical threads, but lines of tension in the meat. The strands of muscle and nerve were like strings on an instrument, ready to be plucked.

Slowly, carefully, I reached out with my will.

— Puppet Strings.

At first, the connection felt tenuous, slippery, an electric current dancing across the surface of a muscle fiber. Then, gradually, it solidified. Became tangible. I could feel the individual fibers under my touch, the twitching of micro-tendons. The faint thrum of a pulse in a nearby artery.

—There!

With a push, I sent an impulse down a nerve pathway, a surge of intention that raced toward a cluster of muscle.

Nothing.

Frustration welled up. Was the system lying to me?

— Puppet Strings.

I tried again. This time, I concentrated on the precise location where the nerve and sinew meet. Another pulse. Still, the muscle lay dormant. But I caught a glimmer, a flicker of something, deep in the network of cells.

— Puppet Strings. Please, work!

I focused all my energy on making that muscle twitch.

Finally, it spasmed.

Not the smooth, controlled flexion I was aiming for. But it was proof. Confirmation that I was not a mere prisoner in this place, a spectator to the body's workings. I could affect or change things, even if only slightly.

But I could feel the cost, too. The effort had drained a little of my reserves, a subtle siphoning of my essence.

Biomass 0/3

The system message confirmed what I already knew. Using this power had a price.

—It was still worth it. Is biomass equivalent to mana? Maybe not. I have been…reincarnated as a bug, so it’s safe to assume mana is a thing? 

I was grinning—or would have been, if I still had a face. The panic, the helplessness of before—it ebbed beneath a new truth, one that hummed through me like a second heartbeat.

I wasn’t just a parasite anymore.

I was a puppeteer.