"Oh cool. They brought back the Farscape theme."

- me listening to the Jenova Emergent battle music

"How exactly does the suit work? Some weird Samus Aran magical girl hologram thing? Muv-Luv pilot suit foundation + Mai Otome nanomachines?"

"Booba"

- An in-depth reddit discussion that definitely helped me understand the detailed and intricate worldbuilding of Stellar Blade

"Smoke if you got 'em."

- Spaceballs

Eve's organs were very accommodating to their new alien overlords. Molecule by molecule, her cells were strutting away from their outdated human traits and changing into something more fitting for the horrible new Earth. Out of all the harrowing misery she could have fallen to in this planetary war, she never thought she'd end up pupating into an exotic new lifeform inside the belly of her sworn enemy. Her disastrous mission had seen her climb out of the pressurized fluid of her landing capsule, and almost immediately get captured and tossed into the amniotic sack of a Naytiba Recycler. It was a very wet and vulnerable existence for her.

Eve was missing, and the only trace of her that remained was a shapely misshapen hernia glowing bright green under the Naytiba's back legs. It was dark, it was perpetually cramped, and her throbbing head couldn't discern if her body was curled upward or downward in relation to the ground her carrier was crawling over. She couldn't even be too sure of what was her own body anymore. Alas, little space soldier. Now you're just a pink hotdog getting your buns baked in cosmic bacteria.

Once an infantry trooper was disarmed and shoved inside one of these quivering Naytiba cows, there was only two routes she could go: Into the stomach to get her carbs digested for energy, or into a diseased spawning udder to get her genes spliced. Eve was never prepared for this kind of agonizing imprisonment, where a contortionist with gills would have a hard time living comfortably. Her positioning would be roughly described as fetal, if she were the fetus of an aquatic lizard. Getting instantly crushed to death under a crashing dropship didn't seem like such a bad way to die in hindsight.

Things that functioned like her nostrils on something that may have been her nose sniffed the murky bubbles surrounding her. She suddenly became aware she was hungry. Very, very hungry. For sapient flesh.

A long metallic edge stabbed through a rubbery and rocky wall, and the water instantly rushed away from her like some disrespectful lech just tore open her portable shower. She was being stabbed with a sword. Or was she the one doing the stabbing? Her biogenic veil flapped open, blinding her fragmented vision with bright fiery light, and she crumpled over the sand in a heap of dark contours covered in steam.

The new Naytiba drone rose to her heels as if she were a weightless doll being pulled up on invisible strings. The "mother" Naytiba groaned in powerful reverberating pain, or moaned in relief. It crept away on its segmented talons to get some rest, before it started looking for more remains of the 7th Airborne to convert into its brood.

L1lyth identified the source of the scent had triggered her hunger: Two pathetic thinly-dressed things that greatly resembled what Eve used to be, and had arrived just in time to witness Eve's gruesome and procreant fate.

"We're too late," Tachy choked with horror. "It's already completed the Metamorphosis."

L1lyth was a sinister, ghastly, and beautiful lifeform that could barely be considered humanoid. A layer of jade wasp carapace formed her armored corset, a translucent wing membrane shrouded her shoulders and thighs, jagged fly mandibles formed her mouth, eight rows of tarantula sensors served as her eyes, a four-foot-long quasi-mechanical scorpion dangled from her head like a murderous ponytail, and a faint sprinkling of moth dust made her whole body shine and glitter in all the right corners. She communicated solely with quick head twitches and short hissing-clicking sounds.

"Ew." Lily turned her eyes away in disgust.

Unlike the frail Eve who needed to be trained over years to become an experienced warrior, L1lyth was born as a vicious apex predator ready to unleash her wrath on all of her prey. She quickly poised for attack by bending her legs backwards in a very un-human and mantis-like way.

"Yuck." Lily shuddered with repulsiveness.

L1lyth drew her sword on her former allies, which was now less of a "sword" and more like an extendable claw that tore through the bones in her arm.

"Gross." Lily winced.

Tachy could have reassured her younger, more innocent comrade who had never been exposed to the true horrors of war. She could have offered Lily advice on how to protect herself from this dangerous new form of Naytiba to increase her odds of survival. But instead, the field commander simply grumbled "Don't you have anything better to say?"

"What should we call her now? Ewve?" Lily asked while she was still shivering.

"Call her whatever you want. Eve is gone." Tachy shook her head in defeat.

"Is there anything we can do for her?" The younger officer clung to the slightest bit of hope.

"Kill her." Tachy coldly, and regretfully, replied. As a long-haired katana-wielding army leader in a yellow and black bodysuit fighting a losing war against an alien invasion, she probably knew a thing or two about putting doomed squadmates out of their misery.

But unfortunately for her new enemies, L1lyth didn't feel like dying any time soon. She launched into her attack determined to carve some rare primate meat off some weak calcium bones. The last thing her victims would ever hear was her clear shoulder wings buzzing like organic turbines in a death march.

Author's notes:

Am I being too derivative? I feel like I'm losing my edge with these "Turn anime girls into weird other things" fanfics.

When I first saw previews for Project Eve back in 2021-ish, I thought "Oh. Well that's a nice-looking Blade Runner Metal Gear Rising Sailor Moon Back to the Future II world. Maybe I'll write one of my stupid little demented stories for that universe, some day." Jump forward to a couple weeks ago when I saw footage from the demo, the first time I caught any glimpses of a storyline for this game, and it starts right off with… a Starship Troopers orbital disaster, fought with K-Pop idols using a captivating blend of Muv-Luv and Mai Otome morphing technology, and one of them is an actual CGI rendition of Post-Timeskip Yui Takamura (Look at Tachy, people. Just LOOK AT HER.) Okay, yeah. I'm onboard with this.

When I was researching more details about the game, that's when I discovered the other sidekick girl who interacts with Eve is named Lily. I didn't pick the name L1lyth for Eve's messed up mutated form to make some kind of connection to Lily's character, because I wasn't even aware the other girl's name was already Lily until I'd written about 40% of this. I just barfed out the name L1lyth as an homage to Lilith, who's like a forgotten Proto-Eve in Hebrew folklore. I'm such a smarty smart boy that I end up predicting things I wasn't even trying to predict.

L1lyth is, uhhh... a shinier version of Trakeena's bug form from Power Rangers Lost Galaxy. Sure. Let's go with that. She might be slightly inspired by the Conan the Barbarian remake, given her whole "Born in the middle of an actual battle scene" motif. I'm going to go out a limb and say the full game PROBABLY doesn't have a "Turns your playable heroine into an alien critter in an icky body horror way if you screw up a parry"-type enemy. But man, wouldn't it be really cool if it did?

Also when I was searching, I found some 4chan posts from a couple months ago that supposedly leaked the plot of the game. And it's certainly… a plot. Is it real? Is it fake? I dunno, but it's probably incompatible with my ideas from this story, if turns out to be real. (These leaks apparently revealed Tachy's name before she was officially advertised.)

Was recently re-watching the anime Romeo X Juliet. Ophelia stands out to me as a really compelling character. A Junko Iwao character who's a weird bluish-green elf lady who's obsessed with sacrificing human people to a mystical tree. Demon Lord Mint Adenade. It's sorta like… what if they made Final Fantasy VII, but now Aerith and Jenova are the same character? Oops I'm rambling about completely unrelated things again. Sorry.