The three verdora emerged from the water, shaking the water out of their uncovered manes. The Delelens looked at the endless shore and the surrounding jungle as though in a daze.

"Excellent," Bath said, stepping ahead. "You have both completed your first real adventure."

"That--less than two weeks ago, we would have died," Erzey mumbled, still out of focus.

Unlike his cousin, Juselin's head snapped forward, his eyes locking onto the profile of Bath's head. "Is this what life in the Wilderness is like?" His expression was characteristically serious, his eye ridges narrowed contemplatively.

"No," Bath replied. He decided to be blunt: "If it were, the Wilderness would be inhospitable." He led them through the dense, reedy jungle, asking them questions about the adventuring experience.

"Juselin," he said. "Summarize the first leg of the journey, before encountering the cavern."

He answered like a straight-A student. "We first descended into the murk beneath the surface. On our way, we encountered numerous small organisms that floated in the water. The deeper we went, the more bizarre the organisms."

"How did we adjust--or fail to adjust--to the changing depth? Erzey."

She gave him a questioning look. "Our bodies naturally adjusted to changes in pressure. However, we were unable to adequately adjust to low levels of light. Moreover, we needed to return to the surface every five minutes to breathe."

Bath nodded, pushing a tubular reed out of the way. "How did our bodies adjust to the rapid changes in pressure? Juselin."

The verdora had all fabricated dragonleaf veils as a stop-gap until they returned to New Faajyun. The Spire's white surface stuck out in the otherwise empty sky, making for an easy return trip. The trio planned to return to the city before heading back to collect their belongings (namely their robes and veils): The shore was too long to attempt to find them now, without any useful landmarks and a darkening sky.

The Delelen almost choked on his makeshift veil as he tried to speak, its tendriling fabric catching on his teeth. "The COTD boons enabled us to adjust to the changes in pressure," Juselin said tentatively. "Though I'm not sure how."

Bath nodded as he leaped over a fallen bundle of reeds. "Let's think about what we know. Erzey, did you feel anything as you descended deeper into the water?"

"I periodically felt pain in my face, around my teeth and my ears," she said. "I felt the sharpest pain when I rose to the surface, though this pain was also quick to dissipate."

"Did the pain dissipate because you didn't seriously hurt your body, or because you simply healed the damage?"

Erzey batted away a thick reed. "Uh..."

"We healed the damage," Juselin replied, voice low and cold. "Because of COTD's painkiller boons, it's easy to forget how much things hurt," he continued. "Even with them, the pain which we felt was truly painful, even if transient."

Erzey gasped. "That is true...the real pain must have been agonizing."

Bath knew that even with the painkiller boons, the pain should have been afflictive. The only reason they were able to disregard the pain was because of their adrenaline high. Bath was pleased with this discovery: the more he studied the verdora danger response, the more useful it seemed.

"So, then, in the first leg of our journey alone, how many times would we have all died without COTD boons? Juselin."

"Assuming that we died every time we surfaced," he said, voice clipped. "Then add the last two deep dives, when we dove into the trench leading to the cavern...Seven times," he said.

Bath had counted twenty times, but figured seven was close enough. The young verdora didn't know squat about the dangers of diving.

"Okay. Now, Erzey, why don't you describe the second leg of the trip, when we entered the cavern."

"During the last deep dive in the trench, we encountered the lair of a leviathan."

Mama gurgle, Bath silently corrected. "...And?"

"We proceeded into the lair, which sharply upturned into a large pocket of air, the cavern. We traveled through the cavern until we came face to face with the leviathan, which was slumbering at the cavern's deepest point."

The female gurgle had been hibernating in a watery, muddy gunk. While Bath knew that she'd wake up naturally for mating season, turns out she'd also wake up to entertain visitors.

"Juselin, why don't you go detail our interaction with the female gurgle?"

Erzey coughed wildly from behind, her dragonleaf veil tangling on her teeth. "Female gurgle?"

Bath chuckled darkly, twisting his head around. "Couldn't you tell?"

Her nostrils tightened, eyes blinking rapidly, skin darkening. The classic verdora blush.

Juselin shook his head. "Thaddeus, I also am at a loss regarding your certainty behind the leviathan's species and gender."

Bath only noticed that the female and male gurgle were from the same species after devouring a few specimens of both. However, this was only because, externally, the two appeared completely different. On the inside, however...

"I'll explain in a moment," Bath said. "First, Juselin, recount the battle."

Juselin narrowed his eyes, but proceeded to explain. "When we reached the terminus of the cavern, the...female gurgle stirred at our approach. Her eyes were hidden under mud, so I presume that she heard us, rather than saw us, coming."

Bath nodded encouragingly.

"She began to squirm in the mud, her tentacles whipping about. She lifted herself up to a height of eight feet above the mud's surface and glared at us with two enormous eyes. Then, she opened her mouth."

The description's a little flowery, but accurate, Bath thought.

 The mouth of a female gurgle lies underneath a curtain of tentacles and a vertical slit of skin. The vertical slit folds outward, turning inside out to reveal teeth studded within. A female gurgle's mouth looks like a human mouth, if human teeth were embedded in the flesh of the cheeks and palate, about an inch away from the lips.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"The gurgle used her tentacles to propel herself forward, as though trying to flatten us with her mass." Not a terrible strategy, Bath thought. The female gurgle is a quivering fatty mess. "We jumped away, dodging the strike. The gurgle began to roll around, however, her teeth cleaving into the ground like grinders."

"And?"

"She crushed my foot under her body, though she was unable to impale me with her teeth. At this point, Erzey rushed over to the gurgle and batted her away. The gurgle rolled away like a cannon ball, smashing into the wall."

Verdora have a word that translates to "cannon ball?"

"Erzey, you continue."

"After the gurgle crashed into the wall, she became extremely angry and launched herself back in our direction. Then, she began to recklessly throw herself onto the cavern's floor, as though she were a hammer trying to smash us. Unfortunately for her, we were able to dodge the rest of her onslaught and she collapsed, exhausted."

"Juselin?"

"Then, as the gurgle lay in a blubbery heap, Thaddeus...pounced onto it and bisected it from the top of its body down to its writhing mouth."

Bath frowned. I didn't bisect it. I merely cut half a foot into its cranial region, slicing its brain as I parted the skin between its eyes. Juselin makes it sound like I did something...barbaric. In Bath's mind, he'd done little more than gut a fish.

"What happened next?"

"The gurgle let out a few gurgling noises before it went limp. Then, you...proceeded to rip it into two halves. You then dissected the gurgle and explained to us what everything inside of it meant."

Based on Juselin's tone alone, Bath knew the dissection had unsettled him and his cousin. In the moment, Bath had noticed their discomfort plain as day. However, he had gone through with the dissection because, if anything else, learning to dissect your enemies for potential weak points was a useful skill.

"What did you learn from the dissection? Erzey." Bath asked. I hope they learned something...

"The female gurgle's body has very little things within it. It only has a long, thin, squiggly brain, a swillin-sized stomach--" I need to look up swillin in the encyclopedia-- "tentacles, and a fleshy mouth."

"There's more to the gurgle than those things, isn't there?"

Erzey frowned. "The rest is just...rubbery, jiggly flesh. It's packed on in layers, providing the gurgle a solid shock-absorbing defense."

Bath turned back toward the cousins. They were almost at the city's walls, only a minute or so left of travel. "Juselin," he began. "Based on the dissection, why was I able to conclude that the leviathan, as Erzey called it, is a female gurgle?"

Silence fell over the group for a solid five seconds. Then, from Juselin: "Its cranium was wrapped in a skin-like sac. At the base of the sac was a few small globes, within which were...something. I confess I didn't pay much attention to them."

Bath wasn't too surprised. This was a lesson in being observant, in trying to pick up on things that weren't obvious, or, more importantly, weren't pointed out.

"You've hit the nail on the head," Bath said. "If you would have looked closer, you would have been able to make out the forms of three half-developed gurgles, two of them male. I presume that gurgle mating season recently passed; the female took her clutch of fertilized eggs into this cavern. The rest is history."

Erzey gave him a dumbfounded expression, while Juselin eyed him intently. However, before the cousins could say anything in response, the trio arrived at the gates of New Faajyun.

---

"You wanted to talk?" Bath said, settling into the cushions of Lisa's upper-story Spire abode.

Lisa sighed. He looks so innocent, staring up at me with his wide eyes. "Bath."

"Lisa." He gave her a lopsided grin.

"We need to talk about...what's going on." Ugh. Too general. "Let me elaborate: I know we both agreed that COTD would, eventually, diverge along two different routes: one centered around peace, primarily learning, and the other around combat and expansion."

"Right."

"Regarding the latter, how exactly have we gone about...ensuring that people are ready to fight?" She wetted her lips. "If hostile alien sapients were to invade right now, how would we react?"

"Assuming that you, myself, and a few heavy-hitters like Dean are insufficient to deal with the threat...we'd send in people who have all their boons. Neophyte verdora have enough raw power and speed to check almost any threat: give them and the humans a month, a year, and we should prepared. Not to mention the quasi-sapients..."

Lisa cocked her head. "Okay. So how do we make sure that the people we send to fight actually will fight? In general, COTD members are untested for battle and might freeze up."

"We solved this problem," Bath replied. "Everything went swimmingly when we sent our untested COTD legion against the U.S. army."

"I'm still fairly unclear how much of the victory can be attributed to the humans," Lisa retorted. "There were around six-thousand quasies and twenty-four thousand humans on site. There were approximately fifty-thousand U.S. troops. Of those, we only killed a few thousand and maimed a lot more; however, how many of those casualties were due to human activity? For instance, I have information saying that each jerboa killed on average one-hundred soldiers."

Bath raised an eyebrow. "Lisa. Didn't you see the humans fight in their little battle formations and groups?"

Lisa nodded. "They seemed to form almost...organically."

"The human body count was only lower because the humans moved in groups, as opposed to jerboa, who worked alone. Most humans simply couldn't find humans to kill."

"But, Bath," Lisa began, "humans don't normally act like that, grouping up and hunting down people."

Bath sighed. "I know." He squeezed his eyes shut. "Humans need conditioning to work together. Clearly delineated power hierarchies. Moreover, they need superiors they can trust." He gave her a knowing look.

All true, Lisa thought. Ugh, this is a harder point to bring up than I originally thought. "I've been thinking about how to square...that, with COTD's motto of self-determination," she said. "Isn't the whole...making people form groups and relentlessly search and destroy enemies...removing people's free will?"

Bath cocked his head. "Well, I already updated how the painkiller boon works," he admitted. "Humans acting like a pack of wolves is a symptom of modifying the nervous system, as I explained the other day." He rolled his head on the couch cushion. "I told you about how the brain worked, and about action potentials, right?"

"Nothing that I hadn't read about in biology."

Bath chuckled. "Well, I changed the perceived thresholds for pain, screening out low levels of pain, and modified pain reception across the board, decreasing pain felt. I also added a different, secondary setting that could be triggered through release of a hormone I designed for this express purpose."

"What triggers the hormone?"

"Oh, for now, only I can trigger its release," Bath stated. "But don't you want to know what the secondary setting does?"

Lisa rolled her eyes. "No, I'm not curious in the least."

"It...well, it makes people exude pheromones, causing them trust one another and band together. I made it so that people who used certain boons more often than others would exude complementary pheromones and group up."

"...That doesn't sound like a side-effect of the pain-killer boon."

Bath shrugged. "The next part is: people killing other people is a symptom of detachment. While the painkiller boon, in its normal operating state, works well enough, the secondary setting--with the pheromones and stuff--sends it into overdrive."

Lisa looked at him blankly. "So, what, the secondary setting turns everyone into a group of psychopaths?"

"I just told you, I updated how the painkiller boon works," he replied, flopping exasperatedly against the cushions. "Actually, the main reason why I even thought to change it was Dean."

Lisa's eyes widened slightly. "Why?"

"Well, he explained it in pragmatic terms, reminding me that keeping enemies alive and converting them is better than the alternative. So I modified the secondary setting to no longer put the painkiller boon into high gear."

"Do we even need the secondary setting, though?" Lisa asked. While I'm glad he nixed the "psychopath engage" button, do we even need the ability to make people form groups on the fly?

Bath shrugged. "Based on how strong one COTD member is, probably not. Hence why only I can activate it."

I suppose that's true, Lisa thought. And now that I know more about this, I'm not going to let him activate the secondary setting lightly. "Good to know. Y'know, Bath, I'm glad you removed the modified painkiller boon from the secondary setting."

"Because it makes practical sense?"

"Because it's the right thing to do," she grinned, flicking her finger towards his face. "Sometimes, I find that, with everything we're trying to do, it's easy to lose sight of our mission. But don't forget: we're doing this to free all sapients from oppression. From what we've seen of the universe so far, there sure seems to be a lot of it, whether from Akila Galaxy or the secretive Core Worlds."

Bath smiled. "I know. Tell me if I ever seem to lose sight of the end goal, okay?"

Lisa nodded. "I expect that you'll do the same for me."