I woke up on day 10 in a daze. I felt a new strength stewing in my big gigantic muscular foot. I felt stronger. And surprisingly, I wasn't hungry anymore.
Something must have happened the day before but I couldn't remember what had happened. All I remembered was that my stomach had spoken to me, and something dark had poked me repeatedly. 'I remember bopping one of them off the branch, and probably crushed some more. But what had happened after that?'
I poked my two eye stalks out my shell to check if the creatures were still surrounding us. 'Nope, nowhere in sight.' I confirmed.
'Maybe I scared them away yesterday?' I thought to myself as I poked my whole body out of my shell and looked around. I was greeted by the morning sun and unfortunately that damn cloud who was floating in the sky.
Waving my nonexistent arm in the air, I yelled out. "I don't have time to deal with you today!"
Yup. I was able to control myself for once. Thinking back, that was so unlike me. Maybe I have grown up a little or something? Maybe I became more responsible for my siblings and was putting their safety first before my selfishness?
...
Instead, I looked around at my siblings as my body towered over theirs. Sliding around their bodies, I noticed that my size was now three times theirs. I was growing bigger and stronger everyday!
Easily, I counted the number of shells once more.
'398' I thought to myself. '43, 5, 96, 118, 75, 12, 160-165, 52, 33, 201, 203, 80, 89, 2, 110, 61, Bob, Bobby, Noname, Brand, Sugar, and Yddad...' I kept counting and a few more of the numbers were missing.
Suddenly I had a flashback of the dark creatures I saw the day before.
'What were those dark colored creatures?' I thought as I remembered seeing the dark creatures dragging some of my siblings away away.
The creatures had definitely kidnapped some of my siblings as many more of my cute, mucous producing siblings were missing. 'Who knows what horrible and dirty things they were doing to them.' I thought.
They were eaten. They were ants.
I secretly vowed that I'd find out what the dark creatures were and bop them into the ground and show them not to mess with my family just like the clouds.
I had thoughts other than revenge that morning as I as I thought about our whole trip. 'Maybe the heavens were testing us snails. They were testing us snails to see if we deserve to exist? Maybe it's just the law of eat or be eaten?' I thought. 'Are we just numbers in someone's sick game of life?'
No, me and my siblings were more than just a bunch of letters and numbers. Although some of them were literally numbers because I ran out of names, we were living creatures and those that died were my siblings.
...
As the sun rose higher into the sky, more and more of my siblings woke up. After an hour, more and more of my little bothers and sisters kept hiding in their shells.
I walked around them and tried probing their shells with my foot. Their undersides were dried up and they had dried out. You see we snails get our moisture and water from our food and they hadn't eaten in days. They had died in the night.
'We need to move quickly.' I thought to myself.
Slowly my mental list of fallen siblings had grown once more. More than a hundred more siblings were lost that day. At that point, so many siblings had passed away and I had my emotions under control.
'We need to hurry up and get to the leaves in the distance by tonight.' I thought as I knew that this was inevitable and I shouldn't make up an excuse.
Luckily, the green was in the distance. The finish line was within sight.
Hurrying I turned my shell around. With my foot, I placed about forty of my weaker looking siblings on my shell and traveled down the branch once more.
...
At sundown, we finally reached the promise land. Leaves! Leaves everywhere! 13 bright and green leaves spanned across from us. Immediately I led my siblings towards the nearest leaf and we all began to gorge on the food.
It was so delicious that I almost cried.
We gorged on our prize that day. We destroyed the first leaf, but I didn't care. We made it. We did it.
I slept soundly in my shell that night.
Summary of Day 10: I led my family to salvation although many were lost along the way.
+ 1 strength
+ 1 speed
+ 1 size
+ 1 determination
[Quest: The Great Snail Migration] (Completed)
Days: 4
Snails: 163
Fatalities: 274
Actions analysed.
Expected survival rate: 10.0%
Survival rate: 37.3%
+ 2 charisma
+ 2 leadership
+ 50 exp
[Title: Leader of the snails] (Updated)
[Title acquired: Snail Colony Leader] (Secret)
+ Grants ability to decide [Friendly] snail colony actions when equipped
+ 1 charisma (passive)
+ 1 leadership (passive)
[Quest initiated: Defend the Colony]