Chapter 1: Something Is Very Wrong With My Body

Only a split second ago, Seraya had been pedaling her bicycle without a care in the world, enjoying the cool breeze on her face and the quiet afternoon.

Then, in a single heartbeat, the space around her seemed to shatter like a pane of glass.

When the ground beneath her suddenly convulsed with a deafening roar, Seraya was struck dumb.

Instead of an asphalt path, her palms met the damp, unfamiliar floor of a primeval forest.

She sat motionless on the ground, blinking as she struggled to comprehend what had just happened. The air smelled of raw earth, stagnant moisture, and strange flora she had never seen before.

Plumes of thick brown dust hung in the air, and the soil beneath her vibrated with a heavy, rhythmic pounding.

Pushing herself up to stand, she felt an odd sensation throughout her body. An electric tension hummed through her muscles.

She glanced down at her forearms and biceps - dense, defined cords of muscle stood out beneath the sleeves of her shirt, firm as carved stone.

Her stomach was flat and hard, her entire frame buzzing with raw physical power.

Wait... what happened to me? 

I worked out, sure, but was I... was I ever this muscular?! she thought in rising disbelief, her eyes sweeping over her shoulders and toned chest.

She was still her usual five-foot-eleven, her proportions familiar, yet she held a strength she had never possessed before.

Just ahead, nestled between thick roots and a bed of moss, pooled a large puddle of rainwater. Spurred by an uneasy hunch, Seraya knelt and leaned close to the surface.

Her own face looked back from the dark water - the same features, familiar nose, dark eyes. Yet when she glanced at the right side of her face, her breath caught.

Across her right temple, tracing down along the cheekbone, sat a sharp mark like a brushstroke of scarlet.

It bore an uncanny resemblance to claw gashes, vivid and blood-red.

With trembling fingers, Seraya rubbed at the mark, but it wouldn't budge.

It wasn't paint, dirt, or a scar; the crimson mark was an intrinsic part of her skin, humming with faint warmth beneath her touch.

What the hell is this?! 

A fucking tattoo? 

A birthmark? 

What happened to my face?! 

Panic swirled through her thoughts.

Before she could even draw a breath, the ground shuddered beneath her knees again, harder than before.

The tremor sent a wave of heat through her, and in that same split second, she felt something so foreign inside her underwear that her head spun.

Her groin had turned impossibly, uncomfortably tight.

Her delicate cotton panties stretched to the limit of the fabric. Something foreign, heavy, hot, and rigid was demanding room between her pressed thighs.

The waistband dug into her skin, and every slight twitch of her pelvic muscles created friction, sending a jolt of heat and embarrassing pressure into her lower abdomen.

She felt the throb of a thick shaft and the weight beneath it, trapped inside women's underwear.

Seraya grabbed at her crotch in panic. When her fingers found a solid, male shape of staggering proportions beneath the cloth, her eyes went wide.

"What the fuck is going on?! What is this?! What the hell is in my pants?!" she yelled, looking wildly about as heat flushed her cheeks in shame and terror.

Right on cue, a deep roar answered her. The dust ahead split open.

Dozens of colossal boars, their shoulders taller than bison and their tusks like elephant ivory, charged straight toward her. For a second, it felt like watching a 3D movie in a theater, freezing her in place.

The sight of the massive beasts trampling undergrowth and snapping saplings like toothpicks left her speechless.

Only when the herd closed to less than a hundred paces, the rumble rattling her teeth, did Seraya snap out of it.

She turned and scrambled toward a strange tree nearby.

Fortunately, her newly taut muscles responded immediately.

Otherwise, she would have been trampled into paste. She hauled herself onto a thick branch with surprising ease, though the aching friction in her underwear flared with every kick of her legs.

Choking dust billowed around her, accompanied by the deafening thunder of hooves.

Like a flash flood, the herd swept through the hollow, tearing up the earth around the trunk she clung to. Seraya held on tight to the bark.

Her arms locked in fear, going numb before she even realized it.

Long after the boars vanished, leaving a swath of churned mud behind, Seraya managed to catch her breath. As an avid paleontology enthusiast, she quickly pieced together their anatomy.

She swallowed hard, muttering:

"Aren't those... ivory-tusked boars? The ones that went extinct millions of years ago? How are they alive? What the hell is going on?!"

She rambled on, trying to untangle the mess of extinct beasts, the scarlet mark on her cheek, and the unfamiliar organ in her underwear, but before she could make sense of it, a low, guttural hiss sounded right behind her back.

Turning slowly, she nearly lost her footing on the bough, dread freezing the blood in her veins.

The triangular head of a massive serpent slid from between the leaves. Slitted, needle-like pupils fixed on her with cold detachment.

Each scale was the size of her palm, and its flicking scarlet tongue was thicker than her forearm. Worse still, two bony ridges protruded near its eyes, giving the reptile the look of a horned drake.

A horned python?! 

How is that even alive?! Her heart pounded against her ribs, but she froze, pressed flat against the wood, scarcely daring to breathe.

Then the snake moved. Its body, thick as an oak barrel, emerged from the canopy, coiling around the trunk as it glided toward her without a sound.

Her nerve broke. She let out a cry and lost her grip, tumbling straight down.

A drop from fifteen feet would normally break a person's spine or shatter their pelvis. Panic seized her on the way down.

The fall ended with a dull, heavy splash into the earth. Expecting the sound of splintering bone, she lay dazed.

Pain flared across her skin, but she was in one piece - the denser bone and muscle of her altered body had absorbed the brunt of the impact.

As she tried to process how she was still breathing, a foul bubbling rose around her, and she felt herself sinking.

She looked around, the color draining from her face.

In her rush to escape the boars, she hadn't noticed that the ground below was a patch of black, treacherous mire.

Foul-smelling gas bubbled from the sludge, and yellowed leg bones from large beasts protruded from the muck right beside her hips.

Anyone with a shred of sense could tell how many creatures this bog had claimed.

High above, the horned python began slithering down from the bough. Flicking its tongue with a faint hiss, it dropped into the mire and glided effortlessly toward her.

"I... I know this is some fucked-up movie set! You... stay back! Director! Where the fuck is the director to call cut?!" she yelled at the top of her lungs, pointing wildly at the creature.

No one answered. The only sound in the heavy silence was the steady hiss of the serpent's tongue.

As the python closed in, desperation took over. Her hands swept through the silt until they gripped a heavy, two-foot-long bone from some herbivore. Raising it like a club, she waved it before the serpent’s snout.

"I... I was a youth karate champion! Don't come any closer, you overgrown worm! I swear to God, I'm not lying!" she squeaked, but the python only reared higher.

"Sssss!"

Taking the bone-waving as a challenge, the beast let out a guttural hiss, coiled its body, and lunged with gaping jaws.

A rancid, fishy stench filled the air. In that same second, a sudden warmth spread through Seraya's groin - terror had genuinely made her piss herself.

She threw her torso aside to dodge the fangs. Mired waist-deep in mud, she could only shift her chest a few inches.

The python’s blunt head grazed past her ear, coarse scales scraping her bare shoulder hard enough to bring tears to her eyes.

Splash!

The strike missed, burying the beast's snout into the foul sludge.

Seeing the head stuck in the mud for a fraction of a second, Seraya ground her teeth.

To hell with it!

Throwing her arms wide, she threw her entire weight onto the creature's neck.

Before it could shake free, she locked her arms and legs around the thick body, clinging like an octopus.

She pinned it right behind the head - where it couldn't turn its neck to bite or coil around her.

But the posture brought unexpected agony. As her thighs clamped down, her soaked, tight underwear crushed the foreign, rigid organ between her legs.

Every jerk and spasm of the snake's muscles ground her new anatomy against rough fabric and scales, sending jolts of burning shame and throbbing ache through her.

Enraged by the weight on its neck, the horned python thrashed through the mire like a whip, hurling black sludge in every direction.

Yet no matter how hard it bucked, Seraya held fast, repeating one single thought:

As long as I don't let go, you can't bite me!

After minutes of thrashing, the python's energy waned. Its body drifted in the swamp water; save for the weak flicker of its tongue, it might have looked dead.

The beast was spent, but Seraya felt no better. Fire burned in her muscles, her limbs were numb, and the crushed member in her crotch throbbed with a dull, grinding ache.

Human and beast lay still, gasping for breath.

The snake stirred.

Deciding wallowing in the mud was pointless, it hauled itself out onto firmer ground. It paused, scanning the clearing with slitted eyes as if searching for something.

Unease prickled at Seraya.

What is this thing plotting now?

In a flash, the python began thrashing from side to side again. Caught off guard, Seraya nearly lost her grip.

Gritting her teeth, she dug her fingers beneath the edges of its scales with stubborn resolve.

But while the swamp had bogged the creature down, on flat ground its slick hide was slipping from her numb grasp.

After a few more attempts to dislodge her, the reptile went still.

Seraya let out a wheezing breath. One fact remained clear: As long as I stay behind its head, it can't kill me.

Bracing for a war of attrition, her thoughts took a bizarre detour:

Damn, the folks back at work would never believe this! 

A city girl wrestling extinct prehistoric beasts like ivory-tusked boars and this horned bastard... and holding it to a draw with bare hands! 

If that isn't fucking epic, what is?

Indulging in the fantasy, she even imagined escaping the wilderness, becoming a scientific sensation, giving interviews, raking in a fortune, and living the dream.

A true success story.

Rustle, rustle...

Right then, the python shifted. Seraya looked up, feeling the coils tense beneath her thighs.

"Trying that again?" she muttered.

An instant later, the beast proved just how cunning an animal could be.

Instead of twisting, it bolted forward like an arrow, charging toward a massive tree sixty yards away, its trunk thick as a fortress tower.

Clinging tight, Seraya watched the trunk rush toward them in shock:

Is it trying to crash us both to death?! 

Is this blind bastard really not seeing the tree?!

She quickly realized how badly she had underestimated it.

The python had no intention of killing itself. A fraction of a second before impact, it whipped sideways, aiming its back - and Seraya along with it - straight into the hard, cracked bark.

It was going to crush her against the trunk!

Seeing the trap, Seraya cursed and kicked off the moving body with everything she had.

She hit the hard ground, tumbling four or five times, scraping skin and jarring every joint.

Before she could even groan, an ear-splitting crack detonated behind her.

SLAM!

The python’s bulk collided with the wood, throwing up dust and showering down heavy, fleshy leaves the size of her head.

Through the swirling foliage, Seraya looked up and froze. Though dazed by the impact, the beast raised its head.

Mouth agape, dripping saliva and hissing in fury, it charged straight at her.

"If I survive this, I swear I'm fucking your mother!" 

Seraya screamed at the top of her lungs as she grabbed the heavy leg bone nearby, scrambled to her feet, and bolted into a dead sprint.