>>5322414>>5322531Rippling strength fills you, the twinging turning to itching in your lost arm. Before your eyes, the flesh squirms, bone seemingly crystallizing into the thin air. It is a slow process- and it slows even further after you have finished with your meal completely, leaving your stump down to the elbow rather than at the shoulder, where it was previously. At this rate, you'll need several more meals of feeding just like this to fully replace a lost limb, though the shallow gashes on your stomach have covered themselves over with a greyish skin. Neat.
You also <span class="mu-i">feel</span> strong, stronger than before. With no hesitation, you swing your fist into the brick wall nearby in this dead-end alleyway and it sends cracks spiderwebbing through the structure, though it also cracks your bones. It is but a moment before your fading regenerative factor mends these small microfractures, and the brick does not benefit from such healing. If you were to glut yourself on a truly massive feast, you could be worryingly strong and durable.
A few minutes pass as this strange feeling fills you, the great horde having now long passed you by. Steve still sits there, unaffected by your newly revealed power in any way. He just sways in the morning sun with his bald head and gangly limbs, business pants torn and tie ripped in twain. Whatever next ambition you have, Steve will have to make do for now, as he is and unaided by any luck or strange power.
With no immediate stimuli remaining nearby, you wander back towards the site of your awakening. The unmoving corpses still rest on the ground there, and you take a moment to look them and their effects over.
The faces are.. familiar. As though these ones were "Steves" to you in a past life. Deja vu (at least, you think that's what it is) flows through your brain and you recognize something else. The strange patterning on the clothing, matching your own! That's an attempt to blend into a more natural environment than the one you are in: camouflage. Memories come rushing back in bits and pieces like a great flood- formations, loading ammunition into weapons like the one that still lies on the floor nearby, conversing with these now-dead men. <span class="mu-i">Military</span>, the word comes, unbidden and unwelcome.
Frustratingly, the remembrance is only partial: names, places, and reasons why you were here all escape you. But you were part of some armed force, brought to this place for some inscrutable purpose. Unless that purpose was to become food for the great mob of shamblers, your mission seems to have failed.
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