Standing in the embrace of a cracked wall, I waited while the spitbats fed. As I monitored them with webtouch, they spread their wings, draping them like blankets over the offal and the mostly-scraped snail shell. Their leathery faces bobbed and their fangs tore into the organ sacks.

When they finished, they flapped away. They sounded like pigeons when they first took off, but soon their utterly silent flight resumed.

I stayed motionless. I only had two pearl beads. I needed a gold. If I could combine the foams into just-under-one pearl for every two snails I killed, that meant I needed to kill twenty or thirty of them to heal completely. Well, as long as I didn’t use too many pearls during the fights. At least, the numbers were something like that. Math hadn’t been my best subject even when I’d lived above-ground on Earth--and now that I was trapped underground in a cavern full of roofie-monsters, I wasn’t completely confident that I even remembered my multiplication tables.

I spent a few minutes trying to pretend that I wasn’t in pain, then I stalked along the dark streets of the buried city, past palaces and ziggurats, hunting for snails. Well, I limped more than I stalked. Still, I found two snails on the wall of what must’ve been an ancient bathhouse, then butchered and looted them. I gazed at the empty rectangular pool in the ground, longing for a hot bath and scented bodysoap. I found two more snails in a maze of small square rooms that felt like monk’s cells. A snail clinging the side of an ironwood-like bureau managed to stab me as I hacked through its shell, but the poison barely affected me anymore.

I felt more like I’d had a shot of whiskey than a paralytic poison.

In fact, if not for that initial jab, you could sell the stuff to Arachrys-folk. It was a nice mellow high. It even dulled my pain a little, as I poked around the furniture, looking for loot. I didn’t find anything, until an hour or two later, when another snail stung me as I braced myself on a stone lintel before peeking into a room. That injection felt like a couple more shots of whiskey, so after I butchered that snail I took a break for a while. No reason to rush, except for the hard throb of pain in my wounded arm.

When I felt completely sober again, I climbed over the remains of wooden furniture into what might’ve been a courtyard. It was open to the roof of the cavern, a hundred feet above me. I thought for a few seconds, then threw an organ sack into the middle and waited behind a mass of pale, vine-y vegetation.

A few minutes passed, then eight bats fluttered around overhead, checking the area before they landed to feed. I watched them with my Daredevil senses. On the bright--so to speak--side, I was ‘seeing’ farther away than I had before, and more clearly. My websenses were sharpening. On the less-bright side, I was almost certain that when the feeding spitbats returned to their roosts, I caught a glimpse of hundreds more of them hanging upside-down waiting for prey.

I slunk through a workshop and into what might’ve been a marketplace. I slaughtered a half-dozen more snails before I felt myself starting to lose my edge. It had been a long couple of days. So I found a nook behind a fallen rack on the tilted floor, stuffed myself on escargot cutlets, then rested for a time.

Maybe I slept.

Maybe I even dreamed of Princess, of sitting with her as she recovered from her exhaustion in a glimmering bed of webs. Maybe we spoke, maybe I held her hand. Not her hand, but her ... claw. Maybe we laughed together, maybe we shared stories. Or maybe not, maybe that was a just a dream.

I couldn’t remember much when I woke.

When I checked my sheet, my health hadn’t improved enough. My arm was still screwed. I guessed that I’d taken too much sustained damage to heal completely, despite having eaten a pearl bead and boosted my Fortitude to 15.

I needed to go for the gold. Which meant I needed to kill another fifteen or twenty snails.

Easy enough.

Of course, I also needed to find that river or aqueduct again. Partly to retrace my steps, but mostly because I stank. I mean, I reeked. Usually you didn’t notice your own odor, but damn. As soon as I’d started feeling a little better, I’d also started to notice the stink, and by ‘notice’ I meant that my eyes watered at the horror.

“Damn,” I muttered. “Like rotting oysters in a boys’ locker room.”

So I climbed higher in the tiered building where I’d found myself, culling a handful of snails along the way. Licking my fingers, I stepped onto what might’ve been a terrace or balcony over a deep ravine--or a sunken street--and listened for the splash of current. The acoustics of the cavern made pinpointing a direction tough, but I thought I heard a faint burbling from the distance to my left.

I turned that way, my eyes closed, focusing through the darkness--and I felt spitbats drop from the ceiling.

Dozens of them. More than dozens. Hundreds.

I hadn’t made any noise, I hadn’t started a lantern, but the entire flock suddenly roused from their slumber. Too many to count. They plummeted into the upper edge of my websenses, then twirled and darted toward the rooftops, spreading across the city. Relief touched me: they hadn’t spotted me, they were just on the hunt..

Then the relief curdled, because one bunch of them--eight or ten bats--peeled away from others and dove in my direction. I still didn’t know if they’d spotted me, but I knew they would in a few seconds.

“Shit,” I said, summoning my hatchets.

The small flock of spitbats veered toward me and I started running, throwing first one hatchet at then, and then the other. The bats parted, flapping faster to dodge the spinning blades. Spit struck my chin--but not my skin. Protected by my beard. Ha! There as no time to celebrate my hirsute of armor, though. I leaped and dove and rolled as more gobbets of narcotic spit sprayed toward me. By the time I was back on my feet, I was gripping my hatchets again.

I pivoted and chopped two bats from the air, one with each hatchet. They thunked the ground and flopped there on useless wings, too injured to take flight.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Then a wad of moisture splashed the back of my neck. Skin contact. Shit.

I spun and threw a hatchet, aiming three feet above the bat who’d spat at me. It swerved lower and I sliced it in half with my other hatchet and the main cloud of bats, the hundreds-large flock, suddenly noticed me. They wheeled in the air, moving like a single organism.

Oh, shit. Shit shit shit. I kept running, sprinting faster into the half-sensed city--and realized that the spit on my neck hadn’t paralyzed me. Hell, it hadn’t slowed me down. Spider-blood, motherfuckers!

The surviving bats from the first group spat and slashed at me. A couple of them hit me but I ignored the pain and the drugs, and focused in fleeing. I raced to the end of the terrace, then leapt across an alley or a street, desperately scanning with my websenses for cover. My legs were strong enough to throw my body farther than should’ve been possible, and I hung in the air for a moment, catching a glimpse of a row of statues on a ledge below me. I thought that I detected protected spaces behind them--or if not protected at least defensible.

So when I landed on the roof across the alley, I immediately turned and jumped down for the ledge--but the flying bats moved even faster. A hurricane of them swirled in the air then thrust downward toward me, narrowing like a tornado ... and an absolute monsoon of spit hurled at me.

That time I could sense it, though. That time I tracked the entire barrage of spit and also the individual gobbets. Which was a pretty badass improvement ... except there was no way for me to dodge. So in mid-jump, I turned to smoke.

The volley passed through me as I wafted downward toward the protection of the statues, but the swirl of bats funneled into the space where I’d been. Hundreds of flapping wings caused the air to twirl and gust. My control over my ‘wafting’ was tenuous at the best of times, and they raised such a strong breeze that the wind shoved me hard to one side, then lofted me higher.

Too high.

I found myself being blown up above the normal roofs, below only the tops of the ziggurats. I cast around for a safe destination as my mana ticked down--and at the fringe of my websenses, I detected a doorway or opening in what felt like an earthen wall that extended from the ceiling to thefloor. Was that the edge of the cavern? Maybe. Maybe I’d finally found the end to this labyrinth. But even if I hadn’t, the doorway looked a hell of a lot safer than anywhere else.

So I pushed my smoke-self to drift in that direction. My attention narrowed and my will sharpened, but the roiling wind buffeted me around like a pillowcase on a laundry line in a hurricane.

Princess murmured sleepily in my mind.

That was the first thing she’d said in days, but I ignored her and focused on that doorway. I threw everything I had into forcing myself closer. I clawed my vaporous way nearer, inch by inch by inch ...

Until I ran out of mana.

I returned to my body in a heavy rush, and crashed down onto the side of a fallen pillar, a long wide cylinder that stretched from a ruined temple to rest propped against the earthen wall. I almost slipped off, but my left hand caught a crack in the stone. I was strong enough now that I could hold my body weight with two fingers, so pulling myself onto the rounded top of the pillar felt easy.

What felt less easy was the bat claws raking across my back and through my hair into my scalp. With my armor in tatters, I didn’t have much protection other than my hardened skin. The bats carved furrows into my flesh and spat into the open wounds.

Which was a brutally effective way to deliver the drugs into my bloodstream. And it that was enough to start overcoming my resistance. The pillar seemed to wobble beneath me. The earthen wall in front of me melted in a green shimmer--but I still knew what was real now, and what was fake. My strengthened blood resisted the drugs enough to keep me grounded in reality. My teeth gritted against the pain and I sprinted along the length of the pillar, ignoring another splatter on my calf, another slash on my arm. I ran with all my strength, then I dove from the pillar, aiming at the open doorway lower down in the earthen wall.

My aim was true.

I flung through the air, my legs still pumping. An instant before I landed inside the doorway, I turned to smoke for one moment, to bleed off my momentum.

At least I tried. But I was still out of mana, so I flung myself through the doorway while still solid, and smashed the floor with full momentum. My ankle twisted and my wounded arm flared and I screamed. I must’ve blacked out for a few seconds. When I came to, I was curled on my side inside the opening, sensing outward at the city and the swarming bats.

But behind me? Behind me, according to webtouch, a stairway led upward, deeper into the wall. And I felt a glimmer of hope despite the agony in my ankle--the agony in my everywhere. Was that a route higher in the Old City? Closer to the surface?

Blinking tears from my useless eyes, I pushed myself to my knees--and five bats whipped through the doorway and landed on me, clinging with needle-sharp claws. They started biting, but they couldn’t maneuver well when they weren’t flying ... and they’d expected their prey to be pole-axed by hallucinations. Too bad about that. I was seeing things, sure, flashes of light and curls of motion, but I was a prime example of Californian: I’d tripped harder from taking too many edibles.

So I balanced on my good leg and hacked those fuckers into chunks.

I looted them as I backed toward the stairs, away from the open doorway and the next barrage of bats. I didn’t want to press my luck.

Health: 20/57

As I grunted at the number, another handful of bats landed on the floor ten or so feet in front of me. They scraped awkwardly toward me across the stone floor, figuring me for an easy meal. So what the hell, I met them in the middle and carved them up, too.

Then I, uh, licked a little blood off my hand, just in case they tasted like those snails, but ... no. Their flesh was more like, well, raw venomous underground bat.

I spat a few times, then retreated again, and lowered myself gingerly onto the bottom step of the stairway. No more bats followed, so I gathered all my beads from my domain. No gels. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d found a gel. Eight foam and twelve pearl, though. Which was just on the border of maybe enough to possibly form a gold.

“Okay, formless flames of billowing bongs,” I said. “Consider this a prayer.”

Then I tried to combine the beads, grimacing in anticipation of failure ... and they melded into a single bead on my palm. I couldn’t see colors in the darkness, of course--at least non-hallucinated ones--not even with my websenses, but there was only one thing they could’ve merged into.

A gold bead.

“Holy smokes,” I said, unable to keep a smile from my face. “It worked.”

I opened my mouth to pop the bead inside, then paused, wondering if I should wait until my health dipped even lower. Yeah, I should wait until I realllly needed the boost. That made sense. I knew that made sense strategically, but the opposing view was: fuck that.

I was in pain. I’d been in pain for days. I wanted to feel whole again.

So I swallowed the bead, and blessed warmth poured through me. Every cell thrilled. Ligaments knit together and slashes closed. My ankle straightened and, best of all, my arm burned with the fire of healing as my missing flesh regrew and unbroken skin stretched across my muscles. I even felt a spot of warmth in my chest, maybe from a cracked rib I hadn’t known about.

I leaned back on stairs and laughed at the lack of pain. I laughed. Sure, I still stank. Sure, my armor was ruined and I was lost in the dark, but I couldn’t stop smiling. For the first time in what felt like forever, I wasn’t in pain. I celebrated with a few mouthfuls of water and a slice of snail. I’d saved a few of the snails in their shells in my domain, figuring they’d keep longer that way. Maybe when this was all over, I’d start a breeding program. Alex’s Escargot.

I stretched. I did the Sun Salutation. I rolled my neck and enjoyed the painlessness. I clapped my left hand on my right forearm, enjoying the sensation of muscle.

I felt whole again. I felt strong.

Then I started climbing the stairs.