I feel like I’ve only just barely fallen asleep when I find myself awake again; the face of the priest visible directly above me. He looks panicked. Well, at least his healing should be stronger since he’s close enough to touch me now. I feel a maw inside my stomach, biting, ripping, and tearing. We’re not dead yet, I see. Based on the facial expression the priest is currently sporting, the key word here might be “Yet.” Once again, I fade to black.

What the hell am I, a yoyo? I should be grateful for being healed. And ok, I really am. But this in and out nonsense needs to stop, I'm not even waking up enough to be able to take in my surroundings in anything resembling a holistic fashion, and that healing isn't doing much to dull the pain.

Just leave me lying here while you guys take on the cats. Either wake me up when you win, or let me sleep until I return to the misery known as death. This back and forth game of heal and harm is garbage. Oh, I see. That should have been obvious from my last excursion into consciousness, but that damn cat is actually ignoring the casters and is continuing to focus on eating me. Look, before you judge me for being slow on the uptake, bear in mind that it's only been a couple seconds, and that I'm unconscious for almost all of it. There's not much opportunity to process anything.

At this point the cat isn't even attacking, he’s actually eating me while Joaqim tries to push enough healing into me to prevent the fade to black from becoming permanent. If Joaqim weren't here pushing his healing magic into me nonstop, I’d already be dead. Just how bad did I piss this cat off that he’s ignoring the people fighting around him to keep going after me? So much for any possibility of it being a natural creature; not that I've ever heard any stories about giant cats that can double as anatomy posters for the local veterinarian. Things go dark again.

I see the light at the end of the tunnel! Nothing so dramatic really, but my eyes flutter open once more, and courtesy of my night vision I can easily pick out Joaqim, who has fallen down onto his posterior just above where my head lay on the ground.

He looks absolutely exhausted. How many times has he healed me now? He’s got to be at his limit by now. I scan my health, currently at 3. I look at my stomach, it's torn up, but my innards are on the inside, that's testament enough to the effectiveness of his efforts.

“Nice work. Thank you for the healing” I say to Joaqim.

I look to my right and see the faceless monstrosity right beside me. It’s not moving, but even now it’s absolutely horrifying, half its face exposed, the other half clumped up in a perverse facsimile of a ridiculously obese leopard. Nightmare kitty, or nightmare cat if I'm describing them to someone else. That's the right name to settle on for these abominations. I look around a bit more and see the other cat, face fully visible, body still smoking. The mage who clearly killed it is seated beside the second nightmare kitty, he seems to have picked up several deep scratches on his face.

I sit up, and volunteer “Nice job maintaining your concentration and casting through that.” We’re all worn out it seems, none of us in the mood for joking. Even the compliments I offered only merit grunts in reply. We sit there for a few minutes, letting our breathing calm, before I resume speaking.

“I don’t think we should continue without recovering our spells.” I look at Joaqim and say “Unless you’ve got more spells ready to go, I think we should go ahead and get myself and the mage bandaged up a bit and then take another round of rest, starting over with the same watch schedule as before.”

They agree. I try and imbue a spell release into my boots, low success rate aside, it doesn’t even start this time. Right. My second imbuement for the day was interrupted and wasted. Stupid 1 minute casting times. Stupid limit of 2 per day. We don’t even have proper bandages, and we end up using some mud as a compress for the more serious wounds.

Don’t do that at home, it’s a really bad idea. Not only does it expose you to a ton of germs, capillary action helps to channel blood through the water in the mud. It’s only better than nothing at all because we’ve already lost so much blood and we can count on getting another round of healing in a few hours which will prevent any nonmagical infections from taking hold. We just need to stop ourselves from bleeding out between now and then. Once the incredibly poor bandaging is complete, the priest and I go back to sleep, leaving the mage on first watch.

Our attempt at rest this time passes without incident, and the priest heals the mage and I once each after waking up. I recovered 6 health due to the rest, and with his heal spell I’m up to 9 out of 11 health. Despite having had most of my intestines treated to the Teppanyaki experience just a few hours prior, my remaining injuries are minor. We decide to get moving. The general plan is for the priest to heal the mage again if the priest hasn’t had to use his remaining spells between now and when we go to camp again.

The actual strength of a healing spell is inconsistent, so healing when you have taken less damage than a best case spell is inefficient... And when you only have 4 spells a day, of which there are only 2 remaining? Well, there are a lot of creatures in the swamp. Efficiency is good. My stomach burns every time I twist my body or even walk casually, but it’s more than tolerable. We grill up some nightmare cat and fish for breakfast, though it’s close to noon, and then we continue west.

“I thought you said it was only a day's travel.” the mage sneers after we’d been walking another 2 hours.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“For a lizardfolk that would likely be true. I underestimated how slow humans are, especially in water.” I calmly reply.

“Ok, you’ve had a chance to estimate our speed. How much longer?”

“Honestly? We’ll probably need to stay another night. We might’ve made it to the edge of the swamp late tonight if we’d been able to start on time, but getting into that fight last night really screwed us up.”

He grimaces but nods, accepting what I’m saying. We continue on in silence for the next several hours; however, unlike yesterday, there is no break today. While we are able to avoid most potential conflicts with a minimal of effort, survival in the wild often comes at the expense of someone or thing else. Not that most intelligent creatures would want to engage with a group of armed individuals for a silly reason like food when there are so many other, better options, but unintelligent creatures? There's a lot less hesitation there, so we have to be watchful and keep our distance from anything that might try and get into a fight with us.

In the late afternoon, while swimming over a 30 meter stretch of deep water, we are spotted by a skeleton wolf. Skeletons aren’t famous for their intellect; in fact they’re famous for not being intelligent at all. Oh, and also for wanting to destroy life when and where they find it. And not needing to breathe. Without hesitation it runs at us through the water, quickly becoming submerged in its own right, doing a strange part swim part run to move towards us by the shortest possible means.

I’m a lizardfolk. To say that I swim well is an understatement. You may have gotten the impression that I can't move well through water due to my difficulties on the birthday hunt, but honestly my swimming ability only looks bad relative to others of my race: Lizardfolk generally have absurdly unbalanced physical stats combined with possessing the same racial swimming advantage I have, I'm just clumsy and slow by comparison to other members of my race.

Compared to humans though? My agility and strength are still lackluster due to my attributes, but over the course of 8 hours I honestly don’t know if I’d be able to make more distance by running or by swimming. Even in short distances the racial advantage to swimming is huge, so much so that I'm confident I could leave Michael Phelps in the proverbial dust. He only swims about 6 kilometers per hour at his fastest pace. He's an amazing athlete, but he's still a human. By comparison, Sailfish can swim at over 100 kilometers per hour.

To be perfectly clear I'm not claiming that I can swim at a speed of over 100 kilometers per hour, I'm merely pointing out that Michael Phelps, while an extraordinary athlete, is nonetheless a human. The species you are born into matters; without magic or technology, a human will never swim as fast as a sailfish no matter how much they train. As for my personal speed? I am a lizardfolk, so I'm able to travel about as fast in the water as I am on land, meaning I can probably swim at about 20 kilometers per hour at my fastest, with most Lizardfolk being faster still.

Looking at the skeleton wolf I see that it is flailing clumsily and inefficiently through the water. I'd laugh if he didn't look so vicious. And yet when I then look at my two human companions, floundering their own way through this water, I see confirmation of my concern. It's not enough that they are humans, these two in particular are also humans that don't swim well; and the wolf for all its flailing, lack of surface area, and general inability to comprehend how it's supposed to be moving, is still quite a lot faster in the water than they are.

“Head back and nuke it from the shore, I’ll distract it and keep it in the water until you get there,” I say.

“Do what?” The mage sputters out between breaths.

“Right, that wouldn't mean anything to you. When I say to nuke it, I mean go back to shore and make it go kaboom with whatever mean spells you feel like throwing at it. Use your magic to make it more dead than it currently is.”

Although their faces make it clear that they are still confused, they are not wanting to engage a creature in the water where their gestures would be awkward and their speech would almost certainly get garbled while attempting to cast, so they turn around and start swimming back. Attempting to cast a spell but having it interrupted means you’ve lost your spell for the day, so it really is a good idea to make sure all of your attempts are successful.

As for me, I swim forward a bit to make sure that it’s chasing me instead of them. As a rule skeletons are not intelligent, and it is abundantly apparent that this beast is no exception to that rule, it is operating purely on its need to extinguish life, so it just tries to chase down and kill whoever is closest.

The next couple minutes are a bit frantic; I lead the wolf skeleton along, always making sure I am closer to it than either of my temporary companions are, but not so close that it can catch me. If this were an intelligent creature, even an animal, there is no way this would work this well for this long. Once my companions have finally returned to the side of the river we started on, I let loose with a smooth butterfly stroke and race to the shore, beating it there with ample time to spare. I pull out my sling and a rock, while arcane missiles fly by me to slam into the wolf, turning half of its ribs into powder.

I wind up my sling as the wolf is just reaching the shore, where the priest was waiting to meet it. Before I can even loose my stone, Joaqim touches the skeleton on its head, completely heedless of its jaws. The wolfs bones immediately disarticulate. That was it for the fight.

Those arcane missiles are no joke; they are highly reliable, there are precious few ways to avoid or resist arcane missiles once they are in flight, but when it comes to destroying undead, Priests are king. You can say what you want about a priest’s combat ability, though from what I understand it's actually pretty good, nearly as good as a fighter. But in one area they are absolutely indomitable: There is no class better equipped to destroy undead than the priest. Not the fighter, not even the mage. That was a healing spell that just devastated that wolf. Practically everything priests do is devastating to the undead.

As a point of interest, one might wonder how that undead wolf came to be here. Well, obviously at some previous point it died. But how did it become undead, and why was it roaming around here? The problem is that finding the answer beyond that is not terribly easy, because there are several possibilities.

Some undead are created by necromancers, also known as Black Wizards. Some undead are created by other undead, like Vampires or Zombies. And most perplexingly of all, sometimes after a creature dies, they just turn into an undead. There is ample speculation on why it happens, like saying that they hold a grievance deep in their hearts, but no one seems to know for certain why sometimes a dead creature stays dead, while other times it jumps up and starts trying to harass the living; nor is there a firm understanding of why this undead will come back as a skeleton, while that one returns as a ghost, while that one pops back up as a vampire, and so on.

One thing is for sure though: Every sentient species makes a societal effort to thoroughly dispose of their dead. Humans will generally cut off their heads and burn the bodies. If they were wealthy sometimes they’ll get buried, but not until after they’ve been ritually blessed by a priest to ensure that they don’t spontaneously return. Lizardfolk? We eat them when we can, and burn them when we can't. That handles most undead.

On the rare occasion when we get a ghost, specter, poltergeist, or whatever other form of incorporeal undead which decides destroying the body just isn’t enough? Well… There’s a reason that, despite not being nearly as strong physically, Shamans command the respect of the warriors. Respecting someone who isn’t strong flies in the face of the Lizardfolk’s prevalent attitude and culture; but shamans get to be the exception, because giving some basic respect to a Shaman is less troublesome than having to be the one to deal with it when your dead Aunty decides she wants to suck out your soul for a midnight snack.