A head rose out from the mud. One that could easily be mistaken for a crocodile’s, if seen from about five acres away.
It was paralyzingly large. It couldn’t be compared with any Earthly thing still living—would even put a T-Rex to shame. It itself was the size of a single whale. And behind it was the loping, curving neck of a brachiosaurus.
At first, I thought the shape was crocodilian too. But for one thing, this head was pointed above the eyes, giving the impression of slick, near-black devil horns. For another, the rising jaws tapered to a point, like a beak.
When that head turned to the side—to get a better look at me—I had my real confirmation that this was no ordinary reptile. The eyes refracted a sea of colors: first flat black, then yellows and cyans, then silvery hot pink. All with a slight swivel of the head, a minute change in its angle with the afternoon sun. The colors changed so often they were hard to look at.
This was none other than a mud dragon.
Okay, it was none other than whatever Vencians called it. But if Clantisere Pond or whatever could be my “Mirror Pond,” so could, like, the Dragons of Blagon.
The dragon-or-dinosaur moved as easily in mud as any crocodile through water. The only difference was the sound of mud churning as opposed to flowing. And as more of the monster’s neck and the beginnings of shoulders rose from the mire, I sensed it was a stride—not awkward or ungainly at all. Though the creature wasn't lean, their movements were elegant, self-assured.
In fact, I sensed pride in that gait. As if this dragon felt that I, their food, was meant especially for them.
They were kind of right.
Except I wasn’t food, I was just a foe giving them a chance to come closer. And giving their fellows a chance to show themselves, after that prideful group-roar they’d given just a minute before.
No other heads were showing themselves, but I noticed unusual ripples on the mud, ripples that only other presences could cause. Maybe if I’d looked more closely, I’d’ve seen tiny devil horns just barely breaking the surface.
Instead, I saw my victory over my literal biggest foe yet.
Let me be more specific, though—because there’s no way I thought I could take on more than one of these dragons, and even then, I knew I had to be crafty about it. I figured that with my current strength and clever use of a few of my Spells, I really could take down one…but more importantly, I could hope to speed my way under the surface to snag that Treasure.
I felt up to the challenge just as much as I felt intimidated and put on the spot.
The chief mud dragon finally brought their head close. First with that massive eye, and then, with a big of a turn, to snort directly on me. I hadn’t moved a bit.
DEF 122 (+50%)
Guard was doing its part to encourage me to stay solidly still. More and more, though, the calm confidence came from myself.
The mud dragon roared.
High Gravity!
Their lower jaw slammed to the earth with concussive force. If that didn’t hurt their pride tremendously, I didn’t know what would…but I was about to!
Though tempted to use Cloak, I didn’t want to end up wasting a one-minute one-target disguise in case the High Gravity had straight-up incapacitated this dragon. Instead, I just went running. But I made sure to jump onto the snout and run down the great dragon’s neck, just like a modern Stone Age family would. I was followed by a pained, perturbed grunt.
The sharp ridges down that neck were like the worst, least useful stairs imaginable. After they pricked my paws a few times, I made sure to keep them safely between them—
And noticed a whole flurry of draconic heads rising up, dripping mud, gritting teeth.
Luckily for them, I wasn’t interested in beating them up! (Yet.)
First I had to hold my breath and force my eyes to stay open!!
Wait, this isn’t water! It’s semisolid opaque mud, Taipha! How am I gonna see anything…or smell anything?!
THUNK.
Diving into mud…it truly has none of the advantages, slight as they are, of diving into water. Admittedly, it was cool down there. But it’s also cool in the refrigerator, and I don’t hang out in there.
Map! I thought as my wide-open eyes were muddified. Zoom! Enhance! MMMAAAAAP!!
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map98-1.png]
This…this actually surpassed expectations!
If I’d been a submarine underwater, my sonar probably would’ve shown about the same thing: sonar-style maps of pits, summits, and ridges. Unlike the charts I’d gotten back in the Kaugs, these didn’t look at all like the fake, cheesy, lazily-penciled-in-by-Sierra mountain peaks I’d come to expect.
In other words, you could actually navigate with this!
Assuming you could survive for long periods under mud!
Well, I got one final takeaway from this dip: the Treasure was inside of one of the deeper pits.
Also, considering how tall the mud dragons seemed to be, and how they’d clearly been striding along the bottom of this mud ocean…I was clearly coming up on the fun part.
A sudden jolt sent me rocketing back to the surface, to which my immediate response was oh thank goodness.
It was the dragon’s neck whipping me up for air and generalized salvation! Afterward, I crashed down on that same neck again, though. Ouch, my cheek scraped a scale ridge.
HP 92% (578/625) SP 83% (499/600)
All my Defense and stuff was doing a lot to keep me safe here!
The jaws of another dragon—one whose head wasn’t bolted to the ground—came diving right for me. I jumped out of the way, landing on the mud.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Wait…gravity, jumping on mud…
Map? And remember to put me on it this time? I thought, bringing it up as quickly as the thought occurred to me so I’d presumably have time to avoid what were now three mouths coming at me soon.
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map98-2.png]
Okay so I wasn’t quite above the Treasure go away Map now!
Dashing on mud was hard. I exploded an Earth Spell chunk into existence instead, and after a brief sniff of turmeric and clay filled the air (according to the item description—I wasn’t smelling anything but wet dirt for days), the chunk thunked right in front of me and I used it as a springboard, heading toward the Treasure.
But it didn’t save me. Specifically, my tail got clipped by a tooth. And that clipping led to gnawing as the dragon ripped me backward and tossed me further into its jaws.
Guard!
It wasn’t enough—not fast and not strong enough. The first crunch crushed me in full, taking half my HP. The second was only mildly softer thanks to the second Guard.
HP 10% (62/625) SP 78% (466/600)
Urgh! Almost without thinking, I burned off three Minor Heals. Each one brought back 100 Health. Not amazing, not terrible. A necessary first step before getting out from between these teeth.
Even with my limbs and neck hanging loose and hovering a foot from the muck, I could still act for sure. I chose an Ice Spell and hoped that if I thought about the concept of firing it directly behind me, it would indeed hit directly behind me.
One all-too-brief, none-too-refreshing zing of peppermint later and the mud dragon’s jaws were cracking with frost. With any luck, so were their nerve endings and muscles.
A very sad side effect of this was the frost leeching onto my own fur and threatening to stop my heart cold. With the dragon freezing and briefly panicked, though, I had time to yank my front legs up onto the side of the lower jaw, get a bit of a springboard, and pull my body out.
Then, instead of tumbling straight down to the mud again, I sprinted across the dragon’s rapidly cooling head to the other side, so I could face the spot with the Treasure.
All while being surrounded by eight dragon heads—six of them actively watching and hissing, a couple of them even raising themselves high like those brachiosauruses of old. It wasn’t intimidating at all!
It wasn’t, that is, if you cleared your head of everything but the goal.
Suddenly the heads staring me down weren’t enemies so much as opportunities. To be precise, they, like the jaws of their compatriot, were more springboards.
In a single second, my mind constructed its own kind of map out of all the heads and necks I saw before me. A simple one. One that could be translated into such simple statements as that one’s higher, that one’s lower, and the all-important that one’s closest.
Probably came in the nick of time, too, because all those mouths and their tusks like blades started glowing the moment I started bouncing.
Leap!
I began by jumping on that closest head, then ricocheted, bounded, and boinged in zigzags off of five more.
I wanted this to keep going. Maybe Chora and Reed didn’t have any more of a clue about “my element” than I did, but we were certainly in agreement about my Speed being a very good non-element element of mine. That and pinballiness!
As my feet left the final dragon so fast and forcefully that my paw pads were numb and tingling, a whole bunch of them released Skill energy from their glowing mouths. Just the quality of the air, felt in an instant, told me what it was: with hard gusts like these and no change in temperature, it had to be a mess of wind-based Skills. All flying to make a cross-section on me!
But no sooner had these gusts been unleashed than my stride through the sky took a sudden downturn. High Gravity!
Bracing myself for impact, I knew that the actual fun part of this was over and the sarcastically fun part had just begun. And just in case I needed more force to plunge meters and meters down, I made a few more preparations…
First, I let off two more Guards, for four total. Both for defense and to make it easier to break the surface.
HP 57% (359/625) SP 56% (334/600)
Then I burned a High Gravity.
This gave me barely enough time to curl up and pray for my inner ears before smacking into the mud—and through.
Now I was falling about as fast as I’d have expected to cannonball in standard water. Which didn’t feel very fast, but I reminded myself that it was semisolid, and the impact had to have made, at least, a big gross splash.
This was my smartest gambit yet! Even with my eyes closed, I found I could still see the Map behind my closed eyelids if I willed it. So that’s what I did as I fell farther down.
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map98-3.png]
Okay, so I was off target, but only by a smidge. That wasn’t a problem, I’d probably just fall right next to the thing.
So it’d be directly to the right of me…or the left.
Or maybe it’d be like five paces to my left, such that I’d have to search around for it.
Also, I had no air down here.
…I flailed in a panic for a good three seconds—which, of course, accomplished nothing—before I had the epiphany of a lifetime, and proof that limited Wisdom had a leg up on limited Intelligence.
Air Cutter?
My front paw swatted as far as it could, which wasn’t very far, considering it was being hemmed in from all sides by goo. This was perfect because it allowed me to plunge my head into the perfectly still cut of air and take in a single gulping breath.
Soon I sank past the air bubble, but at least it’d given me some time to look on my whole plan with sane eyes.
Okay, so…finding this Treasure would probably take blasting away the area immediately surrounding the Treasure, to give me a chance to actually detect it.
But the only thing I had that seemed able to burst stuff like mud apart was the Lightning Spell, and that was in my bag, yep.
Ploomp.
I didn’t hear my landing so much as feel it. Alright, considering how deep the trench looked on the Map, maybe I had been falling decently fast.
Now to activate some Lightning and hope it didn’t insta-char me.
Well, fine, I’d Meditate a couple of times first…
SP 34% (202/600)
WIS 152 (+100%)
And maybe I’d release all the Spells into an air bubble, rather than directly in front of my face. Yeah! That stood a chance, kinda!
Air Cutter…
Mud cleared directly in front of my face, in a kind of vertical oblong. Not much space, but it’d have to do.
And two Lightnings?!
A loud, indescribable sound filled the bubble. Followed by another. I can only describe it, in fact, as adfkragnofsk or some other assortment of pretty random letters. If mud hadn’t been singing in my ears, I would’ve needed like five Levels at least to recover from the sheer noise of it.
But! I could feel the world bursting away, expanding below the tides of mud. Instead of my eyes being forced closed, they could see everything! And everything was pretty much rocks, as I’d expected.
Also, everything was illuminated for less than a second, and my camera was in my bag. (As if it would’ve been useful anyway.)
But that was fine, actually, because the point of this wasn’t to see things for a long time. It was to clear space so I could fire a Ice Spell, then slap my paws around thinking Inventory Inventory as fast as nekomata-ly possible.
Ice crackled to life above and around me. I had a surprising amount of room down here—maybe a two-meter diameter of putrid, putrid space.
And that ice was cracking apart already! Of course it was. I guessed I couldn’t expect a random quantity of ice to hoist up an entire lagoon, no matter how magical it was.
So I raced around in literal circles, thinking, Inventory Inventory!
And eventually…
Treasure Acquired!
My whole body relaxed at that pop-up.
Then almost at once, High Gravity wore off, the ice all shattered, and I Leaped straight up. Whether I could even reach the surface safely this way was a mystery, but having gotten this Treasure in a way that was so weird, so seemingly impossible, was making me feel a little invincible.