Dan, splattered with the blood of the beast he had just slain, as he sat panting, exhausted from that short scuffle, felt a deep, biting pain in his gut. Drool pulled on the corners of his mouth, and his eyes watered as he grasped his stomach in agony. "Grah?!" he bleeted in confusion as his eyes locked on the corpses of the creature and his brethren.
'I'm...so...famished...need...to...eat...' He thought to himself. No matter what he tried, his eyes would not leave the dead bodies in front of him. The tempting aroma of their fresh and bloody corpses was racking his brain's survival instincts to consume them.
Dan quickly grabbed the sturdiest-looking rock he could find and shoved it into his mouth to hold himself back. Cracking sounds echoed from the stone within his mouth, but it held, and he didn't care. As fast as he could, Dan grabbed the two corpses with relative ease as he hurriedly rushed back past the 'boulders' or more accurately his still balled up and sleeping kin, right back to the open pond area.
By the time he dropped the corpses on the ground, the rock in his mouth had already turned into pebbles, which he spat out. Then he drank more of the mystical water from before, and without even realizing it, tore at the keratin-scales and hide of the corpse and ate it.
The beast tasted like bitter salmon with a gamey texture, but Dan couldn't care or stop himself as he cleaned its bones of any meat, leaving only a spikey skeleton and hundreds of hard keratin scales behind. Then, without hesitation or control over himself, Dan munched away at his kin's corpse, which reminded him of a steak kebab, but raw and bloody.
Covered in gore, panting in exhaustion, his hands and eyes shaking as he finally regained composure and control over his own body. Dan could barely comprehend what he had just done. 'I-I couldn't stop myself...why...did I do that?' mortified and in awe at what had just happened, that was all he could think of at the moment.
He tried to gag, but nothing came out. His stomach purred. His brain screamed. For the first time since dying, he wondered if there was any part of 'Dan' left inside the thing that he had become.
Snapping himself out of his stupor, Dan grabbed the skull of the beast and dipped it into the water, using it as a wash basin to slowly clean himself of the bloody gore that his feast had gotten all over his body. 'I'll have to figure out why...'that'...happened later. For now, I need tools to fight those monstrosities and survive. I already saw what trying to kill them bare-handed would do to you.' As he thought that, he looked at the skeleton of his feasted upon brethren.
Giving out a deep sigh, Dan gathered the bones of the slain creature and separated them for their sinew. Then, using his great strength, he separated the rib bones from the rest of the calcium constructs, breaking the ivory horns that spiked from its spine—taking the most prominent horn from the nape of its neck and setting it aside for later. Then he stood up.
'If I'm going to make tools, I need to use the sinew of the corpses to bind them. The issue will be drying them, since this cave is so moist. Even then, I need a needle to weave them together. Luckily, we were in a cave, so I could find some calcite to grind the horns of the creature down to craft one.' Dan thought to himself as he headed to the pond, stepping into its waters and starting to look around at its surface.
'Outside of just making basic weaponry to defend myself with, I also require something to keep me from getting skeward by more of those monsters. If I use both corpses' sinew, I could weave the scales into the beast's skull and have a toga-shaped scalemail armor. Yet without a leather or cloth to sew it into, how do I get it to hold together properly?' Dan continued pondering as he pulled a smooth, circular rock from the pond's surface.
Sitting back down near the dismantled bones, Dan picked up the prominent horn he had separated before and started to grind the calcite he had picked up from the cave pond, chipping away at its shape until it became thin enough for his purposes and ended with a fine point. Afterwards, he grabbed the smallest horn from the beast that came from the back of its tail and started using its point to slowly drill a hole through the flat end of his makeshift bone needle.
'The needle is done now. I also know what I can use for the armor's base.' Dan concluded to himself as he looked at the sprawled out hide of his kin that was barely spared the fate of his earlier feasting frenzy. Gathering the sinew of both corpses by winding them together in a ball of tendon, he then placed them on the leathery side of his kin's hide for them to dry.
After doing all of that, Dan placed the beast's skull on his left shoulder to see how well it would sit on it, only for it to be too poorly balanced on his shoulder. 'Hmm. The skull is a poor shape on a shoulder as round as mine.' Taking a glance at the corpse of his kin again, Dan let out an exasperated "Gruh". 'I guess I can't be picky about what material I use in a survival situation.'
Picking up the skull of his dead brethren, Dan adjusted it upon his left shoulder like he did with the beast's skull, and due to its more similar shape, it fit a lot better on his shoulder to the point he could shake it around without holding it. Then he spent a couple of hours sewing his armor together, messing up a few times and having to undo and redo some of his work every so often.
'Damn, these fingers are too stubby and clumsy compared to what I'm used to, and I have to keep looking out for any more of those absurd monstrosities while I'm working on this DIY job.' he grumbled in his mind while weaving in the finishing touches of what he could only call a war dress.
After finishing it, Dan quickly raised it over his head and shimmied into his primitive armor, his nostrils flaring at its stench. 'It's bloody, smelly, and will rot in a few days, but at least for now, most of my vitals are covered.'
The keartin scales woven into the armor were of a sandy-yellow hue with grey fur from the hide slightly protruding through the small crevices of the gaps between their weave. The ivory white, rounded skull had a small crack on its right temple after being thrown by the beast before its original owner had died.
Taking a look at his visage reflected by the mystical pond, or at least what he thought was one, Dan saw a four-foot (slightly over a meter) tall tubby feral-looking creature with canines for teeth, a rounded button nose, upright pointed ears, a flat squared jaw, and rectangular slit like eyes. 'Wow, I'm ugly. At least by human standards, I guess. Not human anymore, I know that for sure now.' I look kind of cool with the armor at least.'
After checking out his new aesthetic for a few seconds, Dan began to use the longest and straightest bones from the beast and his brethren to make a long shaft, which, after chafing down specific parts of the beast skull with some more smooth calcite or limestone in specfic areas and lodging the sturdiest of it's horns into it he tied the two things togheter to craft a makeshift long warclub.
The bone warclub stood at twice his height, at 8 feet (2 1/2 meters), with blood coagulating down the right eye socket of the beast's skull and spikes protruding from all over its cranium. At the halfway point, the bones bent, with the top bones curving outwards, since they came from the monster's bent back leg bones. With it, his savage looking visage, and his primial armor, he looked like a monstrous berserker from Norse myth.
'Now then, time to scout the ar-' before Dan could finish the thought, he felt the ground rumbling beneath his bare feet, only maintaining his balance by using his warclub as a crutch. The shaking only got stronger as the seconds ticked by before all hell broke loose.
A dozen of Dan's new kin entered the open area, with a few bleeding from some injuries, fleeing from seven more of the same beast he had killed some hours ago, heading directly in his direction towards the mystical pond.
"Gruh!" or "Grah!" or a multitude of variations of that guttural call was all they would make, not in fear but as a hunting call that Dan found himself instinctively understanding despite the bleeted sounds having no real meaning.
Following his new instincts and intuition, Dan sidestepped the charging horde until all but the last beast lagging behind the others was about to pass him. Then he swung his warclub in an upward swing like he was trying to hit a golf ball. With that one smooth motion instead of the creature reeling back from pain, Dan found himself as surprised as he was disgusted when he saw the head explode off the body, and its blood gushing from the new stump gushed out like a river all over him.
'I just wash myself off!' he complained in his mind as he rushed towards the other beasts still chasing after his brethren, with one already dead on the furthest monster's horns. Another one was about to be pierced to death, but before that happened, Dan put all of his strength into his left leg and lunged forward at a speed that made everything but his target a blur.
Using his newfound momentum, he then pivoted upon his right leg and performed a thrust that, thanks to his velocity, broke and dented most of the scales at the center of the beast's body. The monster was left stunned, coughing up blood, while Dan's kin ran and jumped into the water to escape it.
Without skipping a beat, Dan went around to the front of the creature as fast as he could before pulling the same thing he did on the first of the monsters he had killed, making him even more dirty and wishing he could join his brethren in the water to cleanse his body of the bloody filth covering it. Yet he wanted to make sure at least one of them survived so he might understand more about where or at least what he was now, meaning he had some hunting to do.
'Phew, I'm damn sure glad that I could understand what that hunting call they gave me tried to convey.' Dan thought to himself as he swung his massive warclub to the side to get rid of the fresh blood staining it. The hunting call his brethren gave him wasn't simply that it had given him some vital information they had learned about those creatures. The bottom of their heads, their chins, had no scales, and the skin was soft.
While having saved maybe one or two of his kin that had managed to hide in the pond, his other nestmates were not as lucky. One of the unlucky ones had even lost an arm and was using it as an improvised weapon to stop itself from losing even more. In the short few seconds Dan had taken to register the situation and swing his club clean, others had died, with two of the beasts surrounding him after they had finished with the others.
'Damn, now there are only the two in the bond, the one using its dismembered arm as a weapon, and the one in the back using one of our brethren's corpses as an impromptu flail. Not like I'm one to talk, though.' he thought to himself as he gripped his club tightly, the bones not even cracking under his strength thanks to being made out of durable material. His heart was bounding, his muscles burning, and his mind reeling, ready for a tough fight that could end his barely a few hours old life.