Re: Dragonize (LitRPG) by Kuiper Chapter 2: Hatchling Fiction Page Donate Report Chapter Preferences Previous
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Chapter Advertisement RemoveReportI blinked and looked around me. I was situated on what appeared to be a flat slab of rock. A plateau of sorts, roughly circular and maybe twenty meters in diameter. I rotated in place and did a quick review of my surroundings, seeing only mountain on all sides.
I looked at the surface of the plateau, seeing only the shape of mountains in the distance in every direction. I wasn't sure that my location bode well for my future, but at least being in a position of relative isolation here in the mountains meant I was probably safe from any threats. I couldn't see any creatures around me, not even any birds in the sky above.
I cautiously moved to the edge of the plateau, peeking over the edge. It was a steep incline downward, but not a sheer drop; I could probably slide down if I had to. I moved around the edge of the plateau, eventually finding the part that seemed like it offered the most gradual descent downward, which was still pretty steep -- probably too steep for me to climb back up.
I moved back to the center of the plateau to consider my surroundings; I saw no need to be in any hurry to get on the move. It was only as I laid down to think that I realized my pacing had been been crawling on four claws, moving as a dog or cat might have. Despite the fact that I had been crawling on all fours, a position that my human body would have considered pretty unusual and unfamiliar, I had moved effortlessly in this way, not even registering until after the fact that I was crawling. The thought briefly occurred to me that out of all of the things that I could observe at the moment, my new body might be the most interesting thing, and yet it was only now that I found myself consciously realizing how oddly comfortable I felt inside of my new body. This must be how babies of any species operate: more preoccupied with examining their surroundings than with examining their own body. I guess that made sense -- all creatures seemed to be born with a sort of instinctive ability to control their own body without consciously thinking about it. But that didn't mean I knew everything that my new dragon body had to offer.
I studied what I guess I might consider my front limbs and feet, the analog of a human arm and hand. I didn't exactly have opposable thumbs, per se, but I could sort of manipulate my claws into a pincer-like grip that could probably allow me to grasp small objects if I needed to. The claws were sharp, curved nails -- actually, curvature aside, they looked more like a carpenter's nails than a human fingernail. The claws protruded from the end of gray, scaly legs. I briefly considered scratching myself to test the hardness of my own scales, but after looking at my sharp claws, thought better of the idea and instead settled for dragging my scaly skin against the rock surface of the plateau. I was able to put a lot of pressure on the rock before I got to the point where it felt like my scaly skin might break; these scales weren't impenetrable armor, but they at least afforded more protection than the human skin I was used to.
I tried whipping my tail around to examine it, but I couldn't turn my head very much, and the tail wasn't very long, so I could barely make out the shape of the tail's tip when I tried to bend it. The tail wasn't flexible enough to curl around, but I could sort of bend it enough to make out the fact that it was covered with the same gray leathery scales as the rest of my body.
I checked my stat sheet -- it felt weird to say that, as though the stat sheet were just another part of my body, but I was somehow able to call it into my field of view. Moving the stat sheet felt just as natural as moving my tail, despite the fact that I'd never had one until now.
Claws: level 1
Scales: level 1
Mouth: level 1
Wings: level 0
Level 0 wings, huh? That probably meant no wings -- I couldn't feel any, not even any little nubs where wings might be. Still, having a 'level' attached to my wings implied that I might one day be able to level them and acquire level 1 wings.
Level 1 mouth...that seemed worth checking into. I opened my mouth and closed it, and I started feeling the inside of my cheeks and mouth with my tongue, trying to get a feel for the shape of my teeth. I didn't have many teeth, and none of them were long enough to really be considered fangs, but they were sharp, like the teeth of a carnivore meant for ripping and tearing flesh, not the flattened teeth of an herbivore suited to grinding plant life.
For a brief moment, I considered what I knew about dragons: dragons could fly, provided they had wings, but I apparently had none -- not yet, at least. Dragons could also breathe fire -- well, that seemed to be a skill that I lacked for the moment, but then again I hadn't exactly tried. I opened my mouth, and tried to exhale in a menacing way, but nothing came out apart from warm air, and exhaling warm air was a feat that most mammals back on earth were capable of. Then again, maybe accomplishing a mammalian feat like exhaling warm air was notable -- I didn't know much about biology, but I was pretty sure that cold-blooded reptiles didn't breathe like that.
[Breath skills not yet learned! Mouth level insufficient to learn breath skills.]
Ah, so perhaps I could one day breathe fire, if my mouth became strong enough. In the meantime, my teeth seemed useful enough, presuming I found anything that looked worth eating.
I opened my mouth again, this time trying to call out, but a small squawk that could barely be considered a cry was all that came out. Evidently I didn't yet have much of a voice, either. I guess dragons don't come out of the egg with the ability to roar.
Having taken inventory of my body and the various appendages available to me, I now considered my next course of action. I looked at the white flakes scattered about the plateau, the remnants of the egg I had just hatched from. If I had hatched from an egg, then that meant I had to have a mother dragon, right? That might explain why I was here on this plateau. I was in a position that would be difficult to climb to, protecting me from predators, a good place to hide from predators.
However, I considered my conversation with Athena, who claimed to have created this world. This world was not one of "emergent order." It operated by Athena's rules, not Darwin's. That meant that I couldn't take it as an assumption that I was here as the result of some matronly dragon choosing to lay her eggs here -- it could be that in this world, dragon eggs just randomly spawned in fixed locations. Come to think of it, Athena did say that this world was based on the myths of Earth cultures, which meant that if I wanted to figure out how things worked here, I might be better off considering what I had read in Lord of the Rings rather than Origin of Species. Well, maybe Tolkien's novels weren't the best example; I couldn't recall anything about Smaug's origins, or if he even had a mother. Come to think of it, most fantasy stories about dragons didn't really focus on the early lifecycle of dragons. Apart from a few dragons that I'd seen in cartoons, the only infant dragons came to mind were Daenerys Targaryen's dragons, and even then, I couldn't recall anything about how the dragon eggs that she had custody of came into existence -- Daenerys might be the 'Mother of Dragons,' but she probably wasn't the sort of mother I was looking for. Looking at the mountain peaks around me, there didn't seem to be any people here eager to adopt a dragon -- or many people, period.
The absence of people might be a good thing. I knew a lot of stories about heroes going into the mountains to slay a dragon, and significantly fewer stories about heroes going into the mountains to befriend a dragon. Perhaps this world was home to a few people who dreamed of peacefully co-existing with dragons and sharing some sort of mutual relationship where they got to enjoy dragon rides, but Athena had introduced me to this world saying that "This world is not always nice." It also occurred to me that even among people who did seek to co-exist with dragons, one of their chief motivations might be to cultivate dragons as an instrument of war, and being ridden into battle didn't strike me as a particularly strong survival strategy. Dragons maybe had it better than war horses, but war tended to be a zero sum proposition of the sort that I had spent most of my previous life avoiding.
It was probably best to avoid people, at least until I understood this world better.
I pointed my snout above, sniffing the air. I smelled an odor that I recognized as sulfurous, though oddly I didn't find the odor unpleasant. Perhaps dragons were used to smelling things that humans might consider noxious. That made sense, if "noxiousness" was supposed to be a warning sign of toxicity; it seemed like odds were pretty good that some odors and gases which might be poisonous to humans could be perfectly safe for dragons. I briefly took the time to sniff the scales of my front feet, hoping to get a feel for my own odor -- if I did have a mother nearby, there was a good chance that her scent might be close to my own. I smelled like...well, myself; I didn't really have anything to compare myself to, but it at least gave me a reference point for what another dragon might smell like.
[MONSTER TRAIT: Kin sensitive. Naturally detect when members of your species are nearby.]
I blinked the notification out of my vision. It was odd -- I didn't feel any difference in my senses the moment the notification had appeared. Had I just learned a new ability? Perhaps, but it seemed just as likely as I was realizing an ability that was already there. Perhaps I was a bit like a human baby learning how to walk -- walking was mostly a test of motor skill and balance; babies had the leg muscles to walk before they mastered whatever brain-body connection it was that gave them the ability to balance long enough to take a few teetering steps. It could be that this 'monster trait' was something that was always part of my body, and in trying to look for other dragons, I was now only discovering that I had that ability.
Perhaps I was now experiencing what all infants experienced. I was, after all, a "baby dragon," and like most babies, it would probably take awhile for me to learn what my body was capable of. What other abilities might I have, not yet manifest? Trying to breathe fire had gotten me confirmation that I didn't yet have any 'breath skills,' so it was probably best for me to experiment. Even if I didn't discover any new abilities, I could also discover the absence of certain abilities, which was informative in its own way. In addition to informing me about my current capabilities, testing my skills now could provide some illuminating information about the body I might one day grow into.
Using my newfound-yet-innate ability, I scanned the area for other dragons, and found nothing. Perhaps that meant I was an orphan, perhaps it meant I was the offspring of one or more negligent parents, or perhaps it simply meant that any potential caretakers were further than my 'dragon-sense' could detect, out gathering food for their newly-hatched youngster. That being said, I wasn't going to hold out on the prospect of a parent coming back; the fact that my body seemed capable of moving about on its own without any guidance from a more mature dragon to teach it the ways of the world seemed to be evidence enough that whoever had designed me had intended for me to be independent.
My knowledge of biology was somewhat limited, but I recalled that many egg-laying species sat on their eggs during an "incubation" period. The fact that there was no parent present at the moment I'd hatched seemed a big indicator that I had somehow incubated on my own -- if a dragon egg could be left to fend for itself, then it seemed all the more likely that a dragon infant could be expected to do the same.
Still, the plateau seemed like a good place to experiment with my own abilities and see what else my body was capable of. If this was a safe place for a dragon egg to incubate, it seemed like a safe place for a baby dragon trying to get comfortable in his own body.
I tried 'standing up' on my hind legs, and found that I could sort of balance myself by placing my weight on my rump and using my tail to stabilize, which left my front legs up to claw at the air. However, I couldn't really move like this; it was clear that I wasn't a biped, and I found it difficult to conceive of a scenario where I'd rather have half of my limbs raised up flailing about. I pushed off my tail, launching myself a few inches into the air before landing on all four legs.
I tried swinging my tail around. As I stood on all four legs, swinging my tail, it suddenly became clear to me that my tail was quite a bit longer than my neck, meaning that my center of mass was closer to my hind legs than my front legs. That was interesting -- it meant that my tail was critical to maintaining my balance. In fact, I now realized that as I had walked around the plateau earlier, I had been instinctively swinging my tail with each step I took. I tried walking again, this time keeping my tail rigid, and found that it wasn't so easy to lift my feet without swinging the tail. Apparently the tail served an important function as a counterbalance with even the most basic of movements. Perhaps that weightiness might also lend it some usefulness in a combat scenario...
I tried spinning around, swinging my tail, and after several spins, I found that I could pretty easily determine how quickly my tail would whip around and what height it traveled at. My legs were short and I was low to the ground, but that was probably a good thing. A tail-spin maneuver might be useful if I ever encounter a cyclops and needed to take a swipe at its legs to knock it off balance long enough to get away.
After several minutes of swinging my tail, practicing my spins and getting comfortable with the motion, I found myself a bit disappointed that the notification interface seemed conspicuously absent. No notification to tell me I had achieved mastery of the 'tail-whip' skill, or anything to tell me that my 'tail' had leveled up. In fact, as far as I could tell, my tail wasn't even something that had a level, unlike my scales, claws, mouth, and (lack of) wings. Still, experimenting like this wasn't a waste of my time -- learning more about my 'stat sheet' was important if it was going to be a measure of my capabilities, but learning how to get comfortable in my own body was equally important. I had played enough action games to know that the hero's ability to survive combat was often dependent on his ability to control his movements as well as the abstract numbers that dictated his power level, and having powers didn't mean much if you didn't know how to use them.
I briefly pondered which part of my body I would try to master next. Perhaps my claws were worth testing. I tried digging at the hardened dirt surface of the plateau, which was baked hard like the red desert rocks that it resembled. A bit of clawing at the ground left a few scratch marks. Most importantly, my claws didn't seem to be at risk of breaking, even as I scratched at the hard surface. Unlike human fingernails, which often seemed like a liability, there seemed to be no risk of me tearing off a claw by accident.
I sat up and scratched at the air. These swipes and slashes ended up being more a test of my front legs than the claws at the end of them. It was a bit tricky, because I was using all four legs for balance, so raising a claw up to swipe meant shifting my balance to one side. There was also the fact that my front legs were short, so short that they didn't even reach out as far as my snout. If I was close enough to something to swipe at it with my claws, I would probably be close enough to bite it, leaving me to question the usefulness of my front claws. Perhaps they were meant more for gripping the ground than swiping.
The idea that my front claws' greatest use might be gripping the ground gave me an idea. I tried spinning again, much like I had when swinging my tail, but this time, I dug my front claws into the ground for a moment as I raised my rear legs. I succeeded in performing a kicking motion just as my front claws lost their grip on the ground, and I felt my inertia carry me through the air several feet until I landed on my side, sliding along the ground and stopping just several inches short of the edge of the plateau. I carefully got up and took several steps back before peering over the edge of the plateau. I wasn't sure I was ready to leave the safety of this dirt and rock platform just yet, and even if I was, an accidental tumble certainly wasn't how I wanted to do it. Just as I walked back to the center of the plateau to consider my next course of action, I felt a notification blinked up.
[You are hungry! Satiety: 90%]
I glanced around the surface of plateau, seeing hard and barren ground. Well, perhaps I'll be leaving the nest sooner than I expected.
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Re: Dragonize (LitRPG) by Kuiper
Chapter 3: Hunger
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[You are hungry! Satiety: 90%]
Presuming that I had started at 100 percent satiety, that meant that I had exhausted 10 percent since hatching, just...an hour ago? If 10 percent satiety was only enough to get me through an hour, that meant I had to eat to full satiety at least once every ten hours, or more than two meals to full satiety each twenty-four hour day. However, I didn't really have any idea of how much time had passed, or if days here were twenty-four hours.
If I had the time, I could find something that cast a shadow to construct a rudimentary sundial, but sundials didn't measure time in absolute terms; since they were based on the movement of the sun, they only gave an idea of how much time had passed relative to the length of the day. There was no telling whether days here were the same twenty four hours I was used to. Though, rather than measuring the duration of day based on the length of an hour, it probably made more sense to measure the duration of an hour based on the length of a day.
It seemed safe to assume that the days in this world had a fixed length, and that length could then be partitioned into twenty four equally-sized units of time which I could call "hour." If the definition of an "hour" in this world differed from the hours I was used to back on earth, it didn't really matter particularly, given that I hadn't brought a clock with me. The only thing I had was my own bearings and sense of time, and I didn't even have my human bearings; I had a dragon body, and the "objective" definition of an hour probably mattered a lot less than how time felt to me in this body.
Assuming I had hatched from the egg at full satiety, I had exhausted ten percent of my available food reserves, which meant that whatever unit of time had just passed, I had perhaps nine times that length of time before I hit the starvation point. Or maybe I had longer than that. I didn't know exactly how my metabolism affected my hunger rate; it could be that my metabolism was lower when I wasn't moving. At the very least, I probably burned through my food reserves slower while sleeping. And for that matter, I probably burned through them faster when moving. I had just spent quite a bit of time testing the limits of my body, and while half an hour of fairly vigorous exercise didn't seem like a lot, it was far more than my hatchling body was used to.
Whatever the case, it was time for me to find something to eat.
I eyed a small loose rock, and poked it with my claw, watching it wobble on the flat hard ground. Could this be a possible source of nutrition? Even hot-blooded mammals benefited from trace amounts of minerals, and in my monster form, maybe I could even metabolize this rock and convert it into some kind of nutrition. If I were a golem or some creature that resembled a living statue, I'd take a chance on this rock. Maybe it was still worth taking a chance on it as a dragon. In a moment of impulse, I bent down and lapped up the rock with my tongue. It slid down my throat and I swallowed it without any difficulty. The floating [hunger] meter didn't budge. On the plus side, it didn't seem to upset my stomach at all.
[Monster trait: Carnivore. Consume the remains of fallen creatures as food.]
"Fallen creatures" had an ominous sound to it. It also left the interesting question of whether a rock golem, if defeated, would count as a "fallen creature" eligible for consumption. Then again, the question of whether rock golems and other non-fleshy creatures existed in this world still remained to be answered. Having seen evidence of elves, cyclopes, and dragons, I assumed anything was on the table, but maybe only flesh-beasts roamed this world.
Well, at least my little experiment with consuming a rock had given me a bit information. In addition to rocks apparently not being nutritionally useful, it seemed like plant life was also off the table. That was something interesting to contend with: being a "carnivore" meant fruit wasn't viable as a food source, even if I was lucky enough to find it. Still, where there was fruit, I could probably find fruit-eating fauna, and fruit-eating fauna seemed like the type of fauna least likely to fight back if I decided to make a meal out of it.
But from where I stood I could see no fruit, nor any trees, for that matter.
It seemed that there was no nutrition available here, unless birds intended to descend from the sky and willingly offer themselves as tribute, and I saw no birds, not even the self-preserving sort of birds that might know better than to fly within reach of hungry dragon hatchlings. However, while this plateau didn't have any prey to hunt, it did offer me one important thing: a vantage point.
I walked to the edge, taking the time to survey my surroundings in greater detail. The plateau I stood on appeared to be situated in a gorge or canyon of some sort, with large rock formations surrounding it. But was this the sort of valley that existed at a low elevation, or a winding passage that existed at high elevation, carved through the upper reaches of a mountain range? The difference mattered a great deal. If this was near mountainous peaks, then my pursuit of food would probably best be served by heading to a lower elevation. But if this was a point of low elevation, then maybe my best move was to ascend. So, which was it?
Looking up, I saw enough jagged formations that seemed to suggest the kind of rocks that might be formed by volcanoes, the kind you might find in a mountain range. The very plateau that I stood on was probably the result of volcanic activity as well, the kind you might find nearer mountains' peaks or summits. That meant that if I wanted to find fertile hunting grounds, I was probably better off trying to descend. This canyon was completely dry, but there might still be some lake if I followed it downward, or maybe an ocean.
That was old-world thinking, though. On earth, canyons and valleys only existed because something formed them, like a winding river, which you could follow to larger body of water where the river ended. But if this were an artificial sort of world that had been designed by hand, its creator might have designed things this way simply for aesthetic reasons. A mountain on earth had to have some kind of proximate cause; mountains were the result of volcanic activity. A mountain formation in a story or an imagined world might exist only because its creator had a certain affinity for mountains.
So what kind of story did this setting tell?
The rocks were baked hard by the sun, much like the rocks in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains near where I had moved for post-grad. I wasn't a geologist, but I knew that the sun seemed to beat harder in Denver because the air was thinner. Higher elevation suggested a summit, confirming my earlier theory. More significantly, though, this valley in which I found myself in unmistakably said "desert." More specifically, it said "hot."
I didn't feel hot. But maybe that was just a natural dragon-born affinity for heat. My character sheet didn't list any traits related to heat resistance, but I had a sneaking suspicion that I might learn about my body's heat resistance if I ever found a fire to experiment with. My reptilian scales certainly made me seem at home in a desert environment.
More specifically, this was a place where a dragon was born. What seemed like a more likely location for a dragon's birth: a valley near sea level, or the summit of a mountain?
The more I thought about this plateau being formed from hardened magma, the more it seemed to fit with the idea of a designed world. I wasn't exactly sure where I had emerged from, and the fact that my egg had been planted on a flat plateau seemed to counter the notion that dragon eggs might be forged in the fiery crucible of a volcano's interior, but the mountain peak idea just seemed to fit better. Intuitively, it seemed like it would be prudent for me to try and descend.
Intuition didn't seem like much to go on when I was betting with my life, but maybe my intuition was better than I thought. After all, most animals seemed to be born with some kind of survival instinct, something deep in their DNA that guided them toward food or spawning grounds or whatever else they needed to ensure the continuation of their genetic heritage. Was intuition so different from instinct? Or did the fact that I was evidently capable of higher reasoning mean that I was expected to reason my way through the puzzle of how to survive, rather than operate solely on instinct?
Whatever the case, it seemed clear that I had seen all there was to see, and I wouldn't find any more answers wallowing in my own thoughts. Leaving the plateau would hopefully lead me closer to food, and if I didn't find food I would at least find more information.
Earlier, I had already determined the point at which the slope down from the plateau offered the most gradual decline, so I walked across the plateau to reach that point. As I walked, I felt crunching under my feet, and looked down at a few shards of the egg I had hatched from. They looked...well, at the very least, they looked more edible than the rock I had experimented with earlier, and swallowing that hadn't hurt me. I lapped up some of the egg shell fragments. It had a sort of muted, slightly bitter flavor. That, combined with the rough grainy texture of the egg shell, made it feel chalk-like in my mouth. I swallowed, and perceived just the slightest movement in my "hunger" meter, but it stayed at 90 percent. Did it really move? I lapped up several more egg shell fragments, and again saw the meter appear to budge slightly.
I continued lapping up the remains of my egg shell until I finally saw my hunger meter change to 91 percent. Hmm. The fact that my hunger meter seemed to have moved incrementally several times before finally ticking over from 90 to 91 percent seemed to indicate that there were actually multiple discrete values that displayed as 90 percent. My "health" and "stamina" appeared to be fixed integers (HP: 20/20 and SP: 10/10, respectively), but it seemed possible my hunger was a floating point, and a reading of 90 percent could mean 90.0 percent or 90.3 percent rounded down to the nearest percentage point.
In other circumstances, I might have taken the time to experiment further to get a more thorough understanding of how the hunger meter worked, but for now, it seemed like enough just to know that tiny bits of food could collectively make a modest dent in my hunger meter. I ate up the remainder of my egg shell (the hunger meter budged a bit more but the numerical reading remained at 91 percent) and made my way to the part of the plateau with the shallowest grade and considered how best to descend safely. That "shallow grade" was still pretty close to being vertical, but extremely steep was better than a sheer drop.
For a moment, I considered the idea of descending bottom first, facing the surface and gripping it with my front claws climbing down in much the same way that a human might climb up a boulder. However, my rear claws seemed equally capable of gripping the rock surface. After considering whether to slide down the grade forward on my belly or to slide backwards with my rear pointed downward, I finally settled on the latter, deciding that if I lost control of my descent and slid out of control, I would probably be doing myself a favor by not descending head first. Besides, my center of mass was closer to my tail than my head, so descending tail first would make it easier to maintain my balance.
I gripped the surface of the plateau with my front claws and swung my tail and back legs downward, quickly finding purchase with my rear claws. I began by moving tentatively, moving one claw at a time while using the other three to stable myself. I continued at this cautious pace for several minutes until the slope became less steep, allowing me to switch to moving two claws at a time. I steadied myself with my front right and rear left claws as my front left and rear right claws swung downward, then did the same movement again, alternating between the sets of claws so that I was able to descend at a pace that felt comfortably safe without being too grueling a pace.
As I reached the bottom of the slope, I did a check on my hunger meter. 87%. At first glance, the number didn't seem too concerning, but it indicated that my descent from the plateau represented around 4% of the satiety that I had started with. Climbing a surface that was nearly vertical was time consuming, even if I wasn't working against gravity. Fortunately, the downward slope of the valley was much more gradual, meaning that I would be able to descend just by walking, rather than clinging to a sheer surface and making my way down inch by inch.
I began walking, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted movement. I swiveled my scaly neck just in time to see what appeared to be a large insect scurrying away, though the word 'insect' almost didn't do it justice -- it appeared to be roughly the size of my head.
Insects. Surely insects counted as "creatures," and could therefore serve as a source of food for a growing carnivore, right? I'd always been told that crickets were a good source of protein.
I hurried after the large insect as fast as my legs would carry me.
[Ability: Sprinting. Increased movement speed while running. Drains stamina.]
As I continued running, I noticed my stamina bar was flashing. Was it worth it to spend stamina to chase down an insect? Would my stamina replenish after I was done sprinting? It seemed there was only one way to find out.
With my increased speed, I quickly closed the distance between me and the insect. It had the shape of an ant, though it was much larger than any ant I'd ever encountered. Without giving it much thought, I reached out and swiped at it with my front claw. I heard what sounded like the 'tink' of metal hitting metal as my claw bounced off the ant's rock-hard exoskeleton. Actually, more than rock hard: my claws could dig into rock (as evidenced by my successful reverse-climb earlier), but evidently they couldn't crack this ant's shell with a glancing blow.
The over-sized ant continued scurrying away from me, and I ambled after it at my more moderate non-sprinting pace before it became evident that the ant was moving faster than I was. My claws had only left a scratch mark on the ant's exoskeleton -- if they had even scratched it at all. The ant seemed too small to pose any threat to me, but continuing to chase the ant would consume more of my stamina, and I had no guarantee that I would be able to defeat it even if I did manage to catch up to it. I was pretty sure that if it came down to a fight to the death between me and the ant, I would find some way to win, but the problem with hunting prey is that it seldom wants to engage you in a fight to the death -- a creature more concerned with fleeing than fighting back has to be outsped or cornered in some way.
Maybe the ant had a limited supply of stamina that it was burning as well, and maybe if I continued to chase the ant, I might eventually catch up with it, but I got the feeling that due to its size, the ant had an easier time sprinting than I did. (It was bigger than any ant I'd ever seen, being roughly the size of my own skull, but that still made it significantly smaller than I was.) And chasing the ant to test that theory seemed like an ill-advised proposition since I still wasn't sure how my stamina worked. It seemed like simple intuition that a creature with more mass would require more energy to keep moving
[Stamina points: 9/10]
I probed at the character sheet, hoping to invoke some kind of tooltip that might tell me at what interval I might expect my stamina to regenerate, but no such information arrived. I was beginning to get annoyed with how stingy this world's designer seemed to be with giving out information about my capabilities -- it wasn't until I had started chasing the ant that I even learned sprinting was a possibility.
Perhaps this was the cost of choosing "power" over "knowledge." It already seemed that I had more abilities than I was aware of, which might be advantageous in the long term after I learned everything I was capable of, but for the moment, I just found it frustrating.
I marched forward on craggy ground. The ground's texture bothered me. It wasn't that the cragginess made it difficult to traverse; my legs navigated the uneven ground without any difficulty and I ambled ahead without the slightest fear of stubbing my claw or misstepping. Were I a human or some other sort of bipedal being, I might have had more difficulty, but I had the advantage of moving on four limbs, which was a lot easier than walking erect and upright. My feet were also covered in stiff protective scales, not like soft fleshy human feet that might start bleeding if forced to travel over this kind of craggy ground barefoot.
The ground's cragginess bothered me because of the story it seemed to tell: this canyon path didn't seem do be carved by flowing water or any sort of weathering or erosion. Riverbeds were covered with smooth stones, and canyons carved by the flow of water were often marked by smooth rocks, not rough and jagged ones like the ones I was stepping over. That left several possibilities: it could be this world's creator had carved this canyon with divine hands that didn't work in the same way that natural phenomena like floods or wind did. There was also another theory that didn't suggest any kind of divine sculpting: this canyon might have originally been carved by a winding river, and then later been covered by the lava of a volcanic eruption. That would explain how a canyon carved by a river could have such a rough surface. Volcanic activity would also explain the existence of the plateau that I had originally descended from.
The question was, if this ground was the result of volcanic activity, how recently had this canyon been covered with lava? It could have been years ago, or perhaps centuries ago -- a century might be a long time for a living being, but on a geological timescale it was scarcely the blink of an eye. If I found myself caught in some kind of volcanic eruption without wings to provide an easy means of escape, how would I fare? I paused for a moment and looked at my scaly feet. They looked tough, but I didn't exactly have the look of a legendary dragon with scales forged in a fiery crucible. I might be able to endure temperatures beyond what most mammals were capable of, but if I ever found myself confronted with magma, I wasn't sure I liked my chances.
Well, there was no sense in continuing to fret over it. I followed the path through the canyon, continuing my search for any sort of creature that I might make into a meal. I wandered through the basin, following a path that felt like a descent (though I couldn't be sure exactly where it led), and soon found what I was looking for as I spotted a hyena in the distance.
The hyena leered at me with glowing yellow eyes. I regarded the hyena warily. As a fellow predator, the hyena was less likely to turn tail and run than the ant I had encountered earlier, and more likely to engage me in a direct confrontation. A creature that could fight back was a potential liability, but the truth was that my only options for finding food seemed to be finding prey that I could corner or outrun, or find a fellow predator and engage them in a battle to the death. I was a dragon, albeit a young one, and though I didn't know much about the full extent of my abilities, I got the impression that dragons were a species particularly suited to a battle to the death.
I tried snarling at the hyena, but my voice came out as more of a squawk. The hyena took a step closer. Evidently I wasn't very imposing. That could be a good thing or a bad thing.
I took a step backward, feigning caution and weakness to see if I could bait the hyena into stepping forward to confront me. I took a step backward, and the hyena stepped forward. I stepped backward, and the hyena again closed the distance between us. It seemed even more confident than I was.
Was that a reason to be concerned? The hyena had more experience than I did, and it seemed to think it had the upper hand. Then again, this hyena had probably never encountered a dragon before. It could be that I had the upper hand. But would it really be so confident approaching a creature it had never seen before? Maybe it could smell creatures that had just freshly hatched. Maybe I still had the smell of egg on me, and this hyena saw me as just a giant, scaly, wingless bird that probably wouldn't put up much of a fight. This hyena had a lot of reasons to be confident if it had never encountered a dragon before.
Whether it was my judgment or my dragon instinct, I felt confident, too. Even as a fresh hatchling, I outweighed the hyena. It had fur, I had protective scales. Its claws looked pitifully small compared to mine. I also had the advantage of body weight in the form of a tail that I felt pretty confident in my ability to swing around. What did this hyena have besides its teeth?
I took a step toward the hyena, by this point close enough that I was within lunging distance. The hyena howled, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement on both the left and right. A second and third hyena appeared on either side of me.
Of course. Hyenas hunt in packs. How could I have overlooked that?
I swiveled my head and saw two more hyenas approaching from behind. That was a total of five, rapidly closing in on me, and I could spot several more even further in the distance, approaching from the same direction of the first hyena.
This was very quickly starting to look like a fight that I wasn't going to win.
I spun around to face the direction I had come from and began sprinting. The two hyenas that had approached from behind placed themselves directly in my path, and I slammed into one of them with all of my weight. The hyena yelped and flew several feet through the air before landing in a bruised heap. It stirred, then stood up. I could see blood dripping from a wound on one of its legs, but it seemed undeterred by my sprinting body slam.
The other hyena leapt at me, and I swung a claw at it, failing to connect with a swipe as the hyena sunk its teeth into my neck. I felt the pressure as its jaws tightened their grip. I spun around, hoping to shake it lose, but its jaws remained firmly around my neck. I reached up with my front leg, and managed to sink my claw into it. Even as my claw pierced its skin and sunk into its flesh, the hyena continued biting down on my neck. I scratched frantically at the hyena's hide, rending its flesh in the process, and that was enough for it to release its grip on me.
I saw the other three hyenas, which looked close enough to lunge at me, and I took off sprinting again.
I didn't look back to see how close the hyenas were following, but I could hear their snarls and growling. They seemed to be keeping pace with me, but at least I was far enough ahead of them to avoid another attack.
As I sprinted, I eyed my health and stamina bar.
[HP: 14/20]
[SP: 7/10]
Only one hyena had managed to sink its teeth into me, but it had really done a number on me. If all five of them had managed to attack me in tandem, I'd probably already be dead.
My stamina bar was still flashing, bringing my mind back to the present. I was sprinting away from the hyenas, and they were sprinting after me. Eventually, I would run out of stamina. What then? Was I just going to hope that my capacity for sprinting exceeded theirs? As a level 1 baby dragon, that didn't seem like a winning proposition. The alternative was finding some place they couldn't follow me to. Or maybe finding some terrain that would let me turn the tables on them.
My lead seemed big enough that I turned my head and took a look back just to confirm the hyenas' numbers. Five were close, plus two more following further in the distance, including the ones I'd managed to damage a bit were still in pursuit. So much for hoping for one of them to bleed out.
Fighting seemed like a long shot. I needed to find a place to escape to. Some place safe, where predators like them would have a difficult time chasing. A place where a helpless infant would be safe.
I estimated my distance to the plateau. From the rate I was using stamina, I'd arrive there with roughly 5 SP. All I could do was hope that I'd be able to climb up faster than the hyenas could chase.
I reached the base of the plateau and began charging up the shallow grade until I reached the incline where I needed to sink my claws into the rock in order to climb. I tried climbing up the same way I had before, anchoring myself with two claws while lifting the other two claws, but I felt myself precariously losing my balance, and had to anchor myself with three claws, moving one claw at a time, a worryingly slow process as I ascended the nearly-vertical rock surface.
I heard the bark of the hyenas behind me, and one of them leapt up and swiped at my tail. I swung my tail, which hit the hyena right in the face and knocked it down to the ground, but I also found myself losing my balance and slid several inches down. Another hyena leapt up, biting my tail, I felt its teeth pierce my scales and sink into my fleshy tale. My health meter started blinking red. [HP: 8/20]
I steadied myself on the rock surface with all four claws as I swung my tail, trying to shake it loose. At first, the hyena didn't do anything in response, but I slammed my tail against the rock surface, and it yelped and I felt the pressure on my tail disappear.
[Ravenous Hyena defeated! Earned 60% experience toward next level.]
I steadied myself on incline, digging in deep with all four claws, ready to tail slam the next hyena that tried to get at me. One of them leapt up as I expected, and this time I managed to hit it with a tail slam before its teeth gripped me, sending it to the ground.
I glanced down, and saw that the four remaining hyenas seemed to be pacing, as if waiting for a moment of weakness on my part. I stayed poised, tail extended outward and at the ready, until one of them took a tentative step forward. From the bloody wound on its underbelly, I recognized it as the same hyena that had bitten my neck before. It leapt up, and I swung my tail up, avoiding its bite, then slammed my tail down, smacking it in the neck. The hyena fell to the ground, limp and lifeless. The other hyenas started to backpedal.
[Ravenous Hyena defeated! Level up!]
My character sheet began flashing with some new notification, but I quickly blinked it out of view to focus on the pressing situation at hand.
I felt a wave of euphoria rush over me. I wasn't sure whether the euphoria came from the relief of seeing the hyenas backing up, or it was something inherent to leveling up. Whatever the case, the three remaining hyenas seemed to back up.
I waited for the hyenas to retreat further, but while they seemed to keep their distance, they didn't leave.
I eyed the bloody remains of the two hyenas that I had defeated with the help of blunt impact and a little help from gravity. I tentatively started to climb downward, and the hyenas immediately began closing in on me.
I had two kills, but these hyenas weren't going to let me make a meal out of their fallen comrades without a fight, and in my current condition, that didn't seem like a fight I could win. I was already below half health, and if I let go and fell down to the ground to confront them directly, I'd be fighting with my back against a wall. Not only that, but several more hyenas were on the way, and there was no way that I could deal with these three hyenas before their friends showed up. The only way I had managed to kill two of them was that my position on the cliffside required them to jump up in order to bite me, making them easy targets for my tail swing, but I wasn't confident in my ability to connect with a tail swing against an opponent that had the benefit of standing on four legs, ready to evade a strike.
As long as I stayed perched like this on the cliffside, they couldn't profitably fight me. But as long as they stood there watching, I couldn't reasonably descend to claim the spoils of my two kills.
I noticed my stamina bar glow as it dropped. [SP: 4/10]
Evidently, staying perched on a nearly-vertical incline wasn't free. My previous descent hadn't been strenuous enough to consume any stamina, but now I was clinging to the rock surface and testing the limits of my endurance as I used my perch as an anchor for tail-swinging attacks. I couldn't stay like this forever, and with descent not seeming like a viable option, I climbed up, eventually reaching the surface of the plateau with [SP: 2/10] remaining. I looked down and saw that the hyenas were continuing to guard the remains of their fallen comrades, and several more had joined them. Six hyenas stood watchfully vigilant over the corpses of two fallen hyenas.
I certainly wasn't going to climb down to confront them now that their numbers had swelled, especially not with my health and stamina both running so low. There wasn't much for me to do other than wait to see if they would disperse, so I settled into a position where I could comfortably lie down while observing the hyenas down below.
The sun hung low in the sky, and as the plateau's shadow grew longer, I watched as the hyenas continued to guard the remains of their fallen comrades, looking up at me expectantly with their glowing yellow eyes, which seemed to only grow brighter as we entered twilight. As I shifted my weight from my legs to my belly, I realized how sore my body was. I had done quite a lot of running for a baby dragon of only one day. That, and I had been bitten quite a few times. I didn't seem to have any serious bleeding wounds, but the day had taken quite a lot out of me. If my stamina points were intended to measure fatigue, I was near the end of what my body could endure.
As I watched the hyenas down below pacing, I found myself struggling to keep my eyes open, increasingly finding comfort in the moments when I allowed myself to close them, and the longer I tried to focus on the pacing beasts below, the more difficult I found it to concentrate on anything. I felt the tension leave my body as I settled into a slumbering pose.
As I closed my eyes, the image of my character sheet came up, and I drifted off to sleep as the numbers appraising my situation sat in front of me.
Class: Baby Dragon
Level: 2
HP: 8/22
SP: 2/11
Satiety: 55%
Strength: 7
Dexterity: 6
Constitution: 4
Perception: 5
Will: 4
Charisma: 2
Claws: level 1
Scales: level 1
Mouth: level 1
Wings: level 0
[2 unspent skill points remaining]
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