I was walking along a quiet (of course), dark (of course), open-air hallway inside one of the big palaces. I was alert for motion from above, and was web-touch scanning the distance for any structure that rose high above the other buildings ... and a needle jabbed into my arm. Right through my armor.

I jerked away from the pain and summoned my hatchets to face the threat, but there was nothing there. Just a lichen-stained wall with what my webtouch told me was a stone ball in the center.

A stone ball that swiveled slightly and ...

Oh! Not a ball.

Another giant snail.

A giant snail that had just stabbed with a needle.

Sheesh. What kind of snail had piercing a mouthpart? I realized that I’d never identified the snails so I looked closer.

INTUIT: Rindian Stiletto Snail, Level 5.

Stiletto, huh? I guess that kind of snail had a piercing mouthpart. Well, the little prick should’ve kept his shell to himself.

I said in my mind to Princess.

She didn’t answer.

I gave a half-assed swipe of a hatchet at the snail. After what I’d been though, I couldn’t get too angry at a little jab that hadn’t done any damage. Though I wasn’t sure why an almost-stationary animal thought it was a good idea to piss off someone twenty times its size.

My hatchet bounced off its shell.

“Goddamn,” I said aloud. “You’re almost as tough as Tiral-ur.”

I whacked the snail’s shell a few more times. It was tough, but not actually anywhere as near as tough as an invulnerable crachen. My blade scratched it easily. I was kind of prodding at it, wondering how the hell a snail had stabbed me, when my webtouch caught a flash of movement from under its shell and I felt another jab of pain.

“Bastard!” I said, and drew back my hatchet to give it a real whack.

Except then I didn’t bother, as a wave of exhaustion washed over me. Damn I was tired. I didn’t want to waste my energy chopping at a snail. I just wanted to sit down. To lie down and sleep again. I’d only been awake for an hour or three, but I felt like I’d run a marathon while popping allergy medicine.

“Allergy medicine makes me sleepy,” I explained to the surrounding darkness.

Then I swayed and almost fell.

Whoa. I staggered a few steps and managed to catch myself, but I still felt unsteady, so I sat on the cool tilted stone road. Weight tugged at my eyelids. Weariness dragged at me. My eyes closed--then I forced them open when a realization struck me.

Poison! I’d been poisoned again. That wasn’t just a stiletto snail, it was a goddamn poison stiletto snail. Next time give me the whole name.

“You fucker,” I mumbled, as the weariness dragged my eyes closed again. “Is this entire ecosystem based on neurotoxins?”

STATUS: The Rindian Stiletto Snail is known to prey on animals of much larger size, relying upon its shell to deflect any attacks its victim launches before succumbing to its paralytic venom. As many as eight hours later, when the snail reaches its paralyzed victims, it digests them alive.

“You absolute piece of shit,” I said, then reached into my mind.

She sent me a feeling of helplessness. She was too tired to even talk, she couldn’t lift a spinneret to help me.

So I harnessed my willpower. With a heroic effort, I summoned every scrap of inner strength and condensed them into a fiery, white-hot flame in the center of my self ... and then I fell unconscious.

* * *

When I woke, my right forearm was in agony.

My eyes sprung open but I still couldn’t see a goddamn thing in the darkness. Of course, they were also swimming with tears at the flamethrower scorching my arm. As I choked back a sob, my spinning, fractured mind pulled together a picture from webtouch: a giant snail’s slimy foot was dissolving my arm. It had already eaten through my armor and my skin and an inch of flesh, almost reaching the bone.

A wave of pain almost washed me back into unconsciousness. Tears flowed down my cheeks and snot poured from my nose. Agony filled my mind, and there was no room for thoughts. Only sensation. Only the rasp of acid against my raw nerves.

I heard myself whimper and felt myself on the verge of passing out. Yet with a terrified desperation, I forced myself to stay awake. To stay away, and to think. At least to take in my situation.

And that time I didn’t pass out. That time I realized that my calf was aching where another snail was injecting me with poison, and a third snail was sliming across my stomach toward my crotch like a truffle pig hunting for a delicacy.

Another wave of weariness hit me, but my incandescent fear of having my dick melted with acid kept me awake. I fought the toxin saturating my brain. I forced my eyes open and clenched my fists. Blood welled from my half-eaten arm when I clenched my right hand, and scarlet starbursts of pain filled my worthless vision.

Still, I managed to summon a hatchet into my left hand, using the power of rawboned panic. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been half-paralyzed and about to watch a giant snail eat your dick, but I will say this for the experience: it was motivating.

I swiped my hatchet at that snail with more force than I should’ve, considering I was wobbly and confused and aiming for a spot five inches from my groin.

I managed to hit it, too. I didn’t break its shell but I batted it off me. Then I jabbed at the one on my right arm. When I scraped it off me, a length of my muscle stuck to its glutinous foot and peeled off my arm and I screamed and screamed.

I managed to knock it to the ground, though.

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Then I started crawling, an inch at a time. I dragged myself across the tilted stone floor away from the snails, leaving a smear of blood behind. And with my webtouched senses, I watched as they pursued.

I was being chased by a pack of snails.

So. That was happening. You think that if you get summoned to a fantasy world you get to battle wargs and goblins and eventually dragons. Maybe you started with ogres and orcs. Hell, maybe you started with dire pumas and thornspiders, that was fine, you didn’t hear me complaining about those.

But there I was, fleeing from a bunch of bloodthirsty goddamn snails.

And by ‘fleeing,’ I meant ‘crawling at approximately one mile per hour.’

Well, maybe not quite that fast, because I wasn’t putting any weight on my right arm. Instead, I was gasping at the pain. Every breath, every movement, felt like I was pressing a red-hot brand against my skin. The only good thing was that I wasn’t using my vision anyway, so the tears streaming from my eyes didn’t affect my sight.

Well, and that the snails were moving even slower than I was.

So after two agonized eternities, I finally put twenty or thirty feet distance between us ... and then I couldn’t fight it any longer. I swallowed a pearl bead and collapsed.

* * *

Then it happened all over again: I woke with a snail crawling onto my calf. I knocked it off and fled, moving at the speed of a legless zombie. Thirty feet farther along, I collapsed into a fitful, pained sleep. They reached me. They stabbed me, they fed, I bled, I woke, I fled.

I healed, then the paralytic drug overwhelmed me and I collapsed.

They injected me, they started digesting me.

I woke, I crawled.

In a daze of pain and weakness, I ate handfuls of my dwindling food.

I crawled, I wept, I slept.

They found me.

I ate again. I slept, I ate. I batted them away. I could fight them off more easily at that point, but I couldn’t beat the exhaustion for long.

Not until this popped into sight:

STATUS: Arachrys Blooded Resistance trait improved to Arachrys Blooded Protection. This upgrade will minimize the effect of poisons, venoms, and other toxins.

And that time, with four snails chasing me at, y’know, a snail’s pace, I dragged my bleeding, limp, agonized carcass roughly down three stone steps then along twenty feet of ancient bathhouse ... and didn’t collapse.

I stayed conscious.

Which wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, because I was a bloody mess. Still, I fought off the poison burning in my bloodstream and drugging my mind. I felt sluggish, but for once I stayed awake.

I drank some water. There was no more food, which meant that days must’ve passed. Days. Let me repeat that, for anyone with reading comprehension issues: I’d been drugged and wounded, half-paralyzed and half-eaten in the pitch black underground city for DAYS.

I ignored the spike of terror in my chest, and tried to embrace the thin thread of gratitude instead. That should have killed me. Hell, the fear alone would’ve shattered me--would’ve shattered anyone, I thought--if I hadn’t had, as my status sheet said, ‘Twominds.’ Because even when Princess was silent, even when she was ‘helpless,’ she was still there. I wasn’t alone.

Could I have survived that horror in solitary, without surrendering to blessed death? I doubted it. But I’d felt her with me. I’d felt her faith in me, and I’d known that if I’d died, she would’ve died, too. That gave me strength.

And I’d also, in my few, brief glimpses of clarity, felt her taking some of the effects of the drug and the psychological damage into herself. She’d shouldered the burden with me; that’s why I’d survived.

She shared her blood, too. Her racial resistance to venom. That was definitely why I’d survived.

So after I filled up on water, I didn’t collapse in a heap of exhaustion. Instead, I started recovering. I bandaged my wounds as well as I could then I rested, waiting for my head to clear and my strength to return.

Twenty minutes later, the first of the snails reached the edge of my webtouch radius. Ten minutes after that, I managed to rise into a hunched posture and limp to one side of the little fucker. My right arm was even more ruined than earlier, so I summoned a hatchet to my left. I dragged myself closer. I winced as I lowered into an unsteady crouch. Then I chopped into the snail’s shell with all my might.

And the snail was genuinely tough, its shell was more like concrete than anything natural. Still, I sliced a good three inches into its body. Then I hacked again, aiming at the wound, at the split in the shell.

I cut it in half.

It squirmed for a moment, then died.

I looted six foam beads from the corpse, then rested for a few minutes.

When I chopped into the next one, my slice wasn’t quite as clean. Snail guts splattered my face. That didn’t bother me. In fact, I bared my teeth in a smile, enjoying putting these little monsters down. I looted seven foam beads from that one, then made a pearl bead. Maybe I should’ve held off, aiming for a gold bead to fix my arm--pearl wasn’t nearly strong enough--but my first goal was survival.

And when I ate that pearl bead, my breath caught.

I fell motionless, shocked by a dizzying rush of sensation.

Because the bead tasted delicious. Heavenly. Mouth-wateringly, mind-bendingly wonderful. Like caramelized meat that melted in your mouth, with a smoky flavor and maybe an apricot bourbon marinade. A hint of garlic, and ... mint? Something fresh and clean that perfectly finished the sensory feast.

I licked my lips, trying to get another hit of the flavor, and realized that I wasn’t tasting the pearl bead. No, I was tasting the giant snail guts that had splattered my face. Raw snail flesh.

“Damn, Princess,” I said aloud. “These are some five star poison snails.”

I killed the third one easily, but the fourth one--the last one--surprised me. A flexible cord flashed from under its shell, moving shockingly quickly, and stabbed my forearm before I swung my hatchet. I could’ve blocked it if I had vision, but my webtouch still wasn’t good at identifying small, fast, unfamiliar threats.

So the snail injected me while I hacked it apart.

The toxin made me woozy--and worried. I retreated a good distance then put my back against a wall and waited to collapse. But I didn’t. Not with that resistance upgrade. Instead, I just felt dizzy. Huh. And when even the slight dizziness passed, I headed back and looked down at the dead snail and then--

Well, then I peeled off its shell and carved its flesh into slices like deli meat.

There was a sack of organs inside that I tossed after a quick nibble, but the flesh itself was absolute culinary nirvana. I couldn’t even describe the texture. It was cotton candy combined with the kind of steak I never in a million years could have afforded.

So I butchered the other three snails and ate two of them. I saved the third in my domain ... then remembered how cautious I’d been when I first arrived in this world, just nibbling on a rahico fruit. Now I was shoving entire uncooked poison snails into my face. But I trusted my Fortitude. And frankly, I couldn’t imagine a better way to die than stuffed with the tastiest meat in two dimensions.

“I wonder how it’d taste cooked,” I said, but I didn’t wonder for long. There was no way to improve the raw snail. Cooking would just be a waste.

So I lazed in the darkness, healing and digesting as my wounds throbbed. I was pretty happy that I couldn’t see my half-eaten arm in the dark. After a time, I considered the mess of my armor and clothing, which now exposed more than it protected. I had a spare shirts and leggings and boots in my domain, but no spare armor. I figured wearing tattered armor was better than wearing none, though.

Maybe an hour later, I felt strong enough to walk a ways. I found a snail-free room and napped again, that time not feverishly. Well, I sweated like I was in a sauna, but I was pretty sure that my body was just flushing out the toxins. And for once, I woke before the snails turned me into a smorgasbord. My right arm still didn’t work, but despite that I felt stronger.

I climbed a flight of cracked stone stairs from the underground space in which I’d been suffering for the past few days, then killed a snail a minute after I reached street level. I threw the organ sack aside, domained the carcass, caught sight--or I caught ‘sense,’ in the pitch black--of another snail twenty feet away.

I tried to domain that one alive, which struck me as an easy way to kill small animals, but I couldn’t snag it. I’d managed that trick with a grub on the upper level, but apparently couldn’t domain an animal sophisticated enough to want to oppose me. There went my plan to defeat an entire flock spitbats by bamfing them into my domain.

As if summoned by the thought, two bats swooped through the air above the street.

I froze as my webtouch tracked them, afraid that they’d spotted me and that dozens more would follow. The two remained alone, though. They darted back and forth for a minute, then landed clumsily at the pile of snail organs I’d discarded.

Looking for a free meal. Huh. That meant I could bait them, if I could think of a reason to.

Plus, they were awkward after they landed. They moved badly when not in flight. Easy targets.

Health: 31/57

I considered attacking them while they ate. Whittling down their numbers was a good thing. And they’d drenched me in an absolute deluge of spit. I owed them for that. But my arm wasn’t working right and I wasn’t sure how much my upgraded anti-poison trait protected me. Plus, I didn’t know if they could summon another hundred bats with a screech.

So I stayed quiet. I’d come for them at some point--but not yet.