Authors notes: Hello guys! I am so glad that some still read my story and are happy for the remake ^^ I hope you guys like it! And also I wanted to thank you for the follows and the likes!

It was more than two weeks ago since he saw the people on the beach. He stopped to count the times that the sun rose or sank to open the way for the moon and the many stars. Even after this long he could feel his body changing. The mutations hadn`t stopped last days were the worst. He always swam near the shore and kept himself ready to leave the water. However, he couldn`t bring himself to do so because of the bad experiences he had already had with humans in their short lifespan as an infected creature. His body had fully healed by the time, he couldn`t feel any pain or growing tissue on his right side and tail anymore. Yet, he couldn`t forget about the pain or the fight.

He was sure as a human being he already gathered enough experience with traumas - both physical and mental. But that was something else. As a human being, as a soldier, he was trained for years to endure and survive exactly these traumas without showing any weaknesses. On the contrary - they made him stronger and hardened his emotions.

In a strange way, it pulled him to the land. He couldn't let it out of sight. Beneath the ocean he was always bored, not knowing what to do. Was it normal for an animal that was supposed to live its whole life underwater to feel this way? He still could think, he could remember a bit more than before and he had the feeling as if the memories came back in time – but always when he was near the shore and could watch what happened on land.

Why couldn`t he live like an ordinary animal? Thinking only of sleeping, hunting, eating and drinking? The basic instincts of surviving. Without worries, without fear of the future, without any terrible thoughts in which he commits cruel atrocities or someone captures him and torments him for an indefinite time. Why could he feel boredom? Why was he always so damn curious about the new things? About what else he could see? Why were these pictures always flooding through his head?

They changed as well as his 'dreams'. Why did he dream? Was that normal for an animal?

In a strange way, he felt like he was something different. Different from humans and animals. He found out that he could make 'smart' decisions.

There was that day he had to eat that damn seashell. There wasn`t anything else to eat. He couldn`t break it with his teeth or muscles of his jaws. Even when his claws failed, he had been able to come up with something different. Knowing what he had to do, he searched for the perfect stone for him to carry to that giant seashell. He managed to grab the stone and bring it to the seashell. The shell, his prey was as big as his head, maybe bigger. With his many eyes he could assess it, but not perfectly. So he grabbed the stone and smashed the thing. Once, twice and in the third time he broke it. The meat was very tasty. He had to admit that he really loved the slimy, smooth meat. What he didn`t liked was the hard thing inside of the meat. When he closed his mouth and bit down hard it broke three of his teeth. It was painful, very painful. He spat the round thing out of his mouth, his loosened and broken teeth as well. Luckily, his teeth grew again.

But on the other side, he couldn`t walk around on two legs – he couldn`t even walk properly on land. He couldn`t communicate like humans or more advanced species. He still acted instinctively most of the time. Although he - for a marine creature and an infected, brainless monster - needed his remaining, partly human intelligence to survive and is more and more thinking about his own existence, he could see himself neither as a human nor as an animal. He became something else - the C-virus made him something else. And it was his task, no, his fate, to find out what would become his task, his path in life.

During the following months, he went more often to the shore, out of the water. At the beginning, it was only for a short while because he needed his muscles to grow used to walking on land and supporting his whole body weight. Unfortunately, however, he found that over time his mutated lungs disappeared completely. He was able to go ashore and move on the sand for a certain limited time without having contact to the water, but during this time he could no longer absorb oxygen.

Strange, because his act of smelling hadn't changed much. Still his nose sucked in the air to perceive certain particles. But his sense of smell became weaker - so he had to learn to use his tongue synchronically to smell. Learning to flicker the snake-like tongue wasn`t a big problem. His instincts helped him to track down food when hungry and to pick up certain gardens by means of the lark. Controlling his new outgrowths on the side beneath both nostrils was much worse. They were small, but seemed to grow and didn`t reached their full length yet. At their ends were small needle-shaped rigid spines. What they were for, he couldn't find out yet. He simply didn't know how to use them. And if he was honest to himself, he didn`t want to use them. Remembering more about his past and becoming more like the person he once had been, he didn`t want to risk taking a step further towards being a monster. He wanted to be as normal as possible – if it even was possible.

Well, back to the walking on land thing: The air was too dry for his skin, or really his scales. They dried out very quickly in the hot air, which caused an unpleasant sensation on his skin. Each time he went on land the itching quickly overcame him. With the spikes in the way, he couldn`t scratch the itching parts of his body. His eyes began to burn in the air, his fins felt like they would tear apart. So he always had to go to the water again, diving down to soothe the unpleasant sensations.

After weeks of trying it again and again his body slowly got used to the conditions of the land. The tiny pores between the scales seemed to save the water beneath them, adapting to the new circumstances. He could close his gills and move without oxygen for a little while. In these days, he felt something growing inside of his tail. Whatever it was, he felt like he could save the water inside of it. Probably to dampen his scales or even to filter oxygen out of the saved water.

Every time when he focused on the strange organs within his tail, he felt the water from them making its way through his body into his closed gills, and back. It was like breathing inside of his body. It wasn`t comfortable, but he could survive on land. It always surprised him how fast the C-virus could change his body in order to adapt to new environmental influences. He decided to use it for his advantage.

So finally, after hard training and a strong will, he could walk longer on land and examine the area. His many eyes sparkled with curiosity as he examined everything that came in his way. With each new experience he made, he regained more of his memory. Within this short time on land he could name the pictures that always flooded through his head. He knew what he saw, he knew what he had to do for hunting and he knew where he could find his life-bringing water.

Sweet water of the lakes wasn`t tasty, but it brought him the badly needed oxygen.

Once he didn`t see the ocean again for days, neither drinking, breathing saltwater, nor swimming in it, his skin changed. The scales hardened and changed their color. They fit in the environment with their color. Although he reached a length of more than a dozen meters, where not a single predator could harm him, the virus focused on his skin cells and camouflaged his body depending on the environment. This enabled him to disguise himself very well without being seen, which greatly facilitated the hunting and exploring. The poor animals didn`t know what was hiding amidst the trees before they were killed with incredible speed.

Animals with fur weren`t as tasty as fish but as long as they satisfied his stomach, he was happy with that. The problem was that he always was hungry. He ate countless times in a day. For that reason he was not very picky. Frogs, small salamanders, birds, snails or rodents were always welcome. Bigger animals like deer or boar were a bit more difficult to hunt. While improving his hunting skills he learned how to use his body. For example, he never knew that he could use the liquid of his stomach that always burned inside of him. It worked like acid, breaking down even the hardest stones.

He knew he needed to learn how to use his new body in order to someday find a way to get his old human body back. He didn`t like it, but he never really liked anything as a human being. He could be the best driver, the best sniper that never missed a shot, the fastest sprinter. He was always dissatisfied and trained for better results.

The sunlight forced him to narrow his eyes as he stood up from the moist loamy ground in the shadow of a big tree where he laid for almost an hour. He could feel his gills and muscles burning because of the lack of oxygen. He forced himself on his legs and walked through the grass towards the near lake. The dew wet his scales while he walked in his sprawling, lizard like manner. He would go into the water and take a while to relax with only his head sticking out at the surface. A behavior he mirrored from crocodiles. It gradually became a comforting morning ritual to get his metabolism started.

He attempted to fully submerge until he heard voices far away from his location. He lifted his head up in the air as high as he could, trying to see something with his sharp eyesight. To his annoyance, the trees and bushes were in the way. The fear still was deep inside but curiosity won and he turned to walk towards the direction the loud voices came from. He slowly crept through the bushes and stopped when he saw two people, a woman and a man, walking on a way through the small woods, heading to the south. Both had black hair and darker skin. They each wore a shirt with darker, long, airy pants.

He immediately lay down on his stomach, staring at the people, whose kept talking to each other. He figured out that he couldn`t understand their language, it wasn`t English. Not that he could speak any language. But at least he could remember a fraction of words. And he couldn`t understand a single word from the two. They stopped, looking around and then at each other. The man stroked the woman`s cheek before they leaned in to kiss each other.

He tilted his head to the side like a confused cat might do. This gesture was familiar, quite comforting but also repugnant. He became curious, these people didn`t seem to be dangerous, and started to sneak closer to the other. The people started to hug each other, whispering something in a low voice. He stopped, lay on the ground and closed all of his eyes except his big main ones, watching them with sparkling eyes. So he could only focus on certain things without a panoramic view capturing all details and thus distracting from a certain intuition.

The gesture of seeing the two people awakened memories and feelings in him that he had not previously perceived as a monster. It felt like he perceived certain things more clearly. The warmth of the sun, the movements of his gill plates - as if he would remember what it was like to breathe. But he felt uncomfortable as he sensed that this gesture meant something private, something intimate. He slowly turned his body, his legs moving smoothly on the ground.

Suddenly the people separated and frantically looked around in a panic, looking to his direction. His main eyes widened as he noticed another four men standing to his right, only six feet away. There wasn`t much difference in their appearance, but he recognized what they grabbed from their hips. Guns, smaller versions of those he already fought against. They pointed their weapons at him as he looked at them. For them he was a very strange and unique but seemingly dangerous creature that snuck up to the pair, probably for a hunt. A maneater.

The men had black hair and their faces were thin, their eyes focused on that big monster in front of them. They didn`t fire, only staring at him shocked while talking loudly.

"그게 뭔데? " the man said while looking at the others in fear.

"나는 그렇게 평화로운 것 같다, 그것은 공격하지 않습니다 몰라".

They kept talking, confused while the pair ran towards them with raised hands and took cover behind the armed men. But they all kept their distance to him, unsure what to do. They couldn`t know that these few and tiny bullets wouldn`t be able to give him a death shot. They would hurt, for sure, but do no dangerous harm to him. Through this security and certainty he could calm his heart and not be panicked, which in turn would result from losing his mind again and possibly attacking these people. He didn`t want to correspond to the common cliché of a man-eating monster.

"그것은 거대한 괴물입니다!"

"뭘 기다리고 있니? 쏴!"

He felt his heartbeat quickening painfully once they raised their voices as he tried to pull more water from the organs of the tail into his gills while slowly walking backwards. His muscles were tensed, the temperature of his blood getting higher as small sparkles appeared on the skin of his blueish fins despite his efforts of staying calm and collected. The men seemed to notice the sparks as one of them fired at him.

First, a deafening noise puzzled him, causing him to clench his main eyes shut. He felt a warm liquid flowing out of the side of his chest as a sudden wave of pain rushed through his chest. He opened his mouth and let out a short hiss in shock, causing the men to panic and open fire on him. He did the smartest thing he could think to do and quickly ran away from them. Although he was big and moving like a salamander on sand, he improved his running skills and became faster.

His strong muscles of his hint legs allowed him to jump through the bushes, avoiding the thick branches while doing so. The tiny sticks poked his scales but did no harm except for a few scratches that weren`t deep enough to cause him any pain besides a tickling sensation. A beeping tone rang through his ears while the pain of his chest became more intense. Probably due to the movements of his muscles in his chest. He could hear the four people shooting and following him. He never expected them to be so fast and bold, for that matter. The pair did the right thing – they fled.

Honestly, he didn`t thought that a few people had the nuts to follow a giant sparkling salamander with a length higher than their bodies together with that tiny guns. They obviously never had contact with giant creatures before – or any monster in general.

When he jumped out of the bushes into the grass he could see other men walking through the landscape, stopping when they noticed him. Where the hell did they come from? And why are they walking around with those tiny guns? Were they hunting something? They had the same clothes as the people whose were chasing him. When they attempted to grab their weapons he stood up on two legs, made himself bigger and opened his mouth wide to reveal his many white and sharp teeth and fangs, forcing his vocal cords to vibrate to let out a loud deep growl for self-defense. The spikes of his neck straightened up and went in each direction around his throat to scare them, while tiny sparks of blue bioelectricity danced on the skin of his whole body. His long tail flickered behind him and hit the ground hard. This defense and inflation gesture has worked well against larger predators and has always driven them away.

The men startled and stepped back, surprised by his actions. Man, he was good.

His triumph didn`t last long when more shots echoed through the air as he felt a sudden pain in his back next to the dorsal fin. He groaned loudly – more so in annoyance - and turned his upper body to the left to look at himself. He could see tiny rivers of blood rushing out of many small bullet wounds along his side and back. Now the new people grabbed their weapons and pointed them at him. Annoyance soon was replaced by fear and anger and he decided to flee. He bent his upper body down so that his front paws touched the ground. He started to run away from the people and dodged the bullets as fast as he could while bending his body strangely during running.

He pulled the remaining water from the tail to his lungs, trying to get oxygen into them. He quickened his pace and turned his head to look back. The people were still running after him but with the adrenaline in his blood he was too fast for them despite his body height and length. It took a long while for him to off the dangerous people. Good, because he was running low on oxygen and had no water left in his tail to supply his muscles. He used his nose to sniff the air while lifting his head up. He couldn`t smell water anymore.

Panic began to raise in his chest as he turned his head quickly to the right and to the left. Everything he could see was the big meadow around him. He opened his mouth, trying to pull air into his body. The attempt failed. His lungs weren`t there anymore, so his chest began to burn badly as a coughing fit shook his body. In panic he forced his legs to move on, dragging his tail behind him as he started to run through the high grass. His heart throbbed painfully against his ribcage, his gills refused to open and his vision in all his eyes began to fade slowly. He could see tiny stars around the area as he came to a stop.

Blood was still rushing out of his wounds, tiny droplets landing on the ground when he looked down, seeing the red liquid forming tiny puddles underneath his body. He collapsed and moved his head on the ground, opening both of his main eyes while letting the others remain closed. He could see the high green grass around him, growing on the marshy ground with some puddles of water between them. He rested his chin on the ground, almost closing his eyes and slowly succumbing to the darkness.

….

...

...Wait

...

Puddles of water?

He opened his many eyes and looked at the small and dirty puddles, forcing himself to his feet and crawled the few feet to one of them before carefully lying on his side. He moved his gills and sucked in almost all the water into them and lay down to focus on the process of breathing. Soon enough, his gills opened again and released the rest of the water. It felt uncomfortable with all the dirt and sand disturbing the super sensitive appendages inside his gills. He would need clean water to wash off the dirt. The feeling of life filled his whole body as the filtered oxygen made its way through his veins from his heart into his aching muscles. It was like taking a breath after almost suffocating underwater as a human.

He didn`t move for a short while, letting his body rest a bit before he got up to search for more puddles to get some water. His dry skin started to itch slowly and he lifted his lower right leg to scratch his right shoulder and neck carefully. How annoying to always keep watch and track for a water source in order not to die from dehydration. He did the same thing with the left leg, always careful with his tiny bullet wounds. He lifted his head and looked around, trying to find a hiding place close to the water for resting.

His main eyes focused on the south as he heard the voices of those people again. They really were some kind of hunters, probably trying to chase him and to put him down in order to do something with his body.

End notes: Well, slowly coming to a point where he gets more contact!
Even though he quite isn`t the luckiest monster.