The tail slammed him in his unguarded ribs like a hammer striking Jell-O. He could feel his intestines shaking, and the resistance the right half of his ribcage should have provided was paltry in comparison to the sheer force of the blow.

                The General could not breathe. The terror of being at the mercy of such a large beast took his breath away. That, or the enormous pressure applied straight to the cavity where his lungs dangled. It wouldn't be easy to breathe or move for a time, and how long, he couldn't say. The pain was intense, unrelenting. The blow had certainly cracked ribs, possibly several, and he was lucky to be alive at all with his organs smashed the way they were. The angle of the blow had been just severe enough to avoid a total collapse; the thinner extent of the tail thankfully deflected by his other, still unbroken bones.

                The shock and agony had pacified him into contemplation over breathing and ribs and tails, and that wasn't good. A pause like this in battle was fatal, almost always, but the creature still hadn't ended him. It took long moments to realize that the Mole-Taur was in just as much pain as he was, possibly perfectly still and contemplating the nature of red crystals and Eimer's Organs. If he had shaken himself to lucidity, though, shouldn't it have also recovered? He rolled as hard as he could from his back, dodging away from where the monster was last.

                The motion was barely on-time, and the ground shook from the intense impact of those fatal fore-hooves' stomp. This was unlike the ones before, an intensity that could only be fueled by a beast forced to a corner. It was furious, desperate, and afraid. That realization would have made him proud if it wasn't so inconvenient, so terrifying. Everything to this point would be a prelude, and he had already expended his tricks, to a degree. It wasn't over until the last soldier was dead, though, and if he only had himself to rely on, he would have to make due. In this world, he could not afford to just be a general, some small-timer. If he wanted to make it his playground, the needed to be The General, and The General did not lose. The names that make the history books were that of the unconquerable- whether it was Alexander the Great, Yue Fei, or Alexander Suvorov, they earned their place by being unwilling to fail, no, incapable of failure. They didn't lose, and certainly not on a battlefield as paltry as this.

                He climbed to his feet, leaning on the wall. It was a tall order to walk at all, but he would fill it. The struggle back down the conjoined hall was almost fatal in and of itself, but he found it lying precisely where he had left it. The Mace. He snapped it up from the floor, tipping over as soon as he left the support of the wall. It was in his hands, but he was vulnerable once more. The beast finally recovered from the last stomp, trailing thick channels of blood from its legs, most especially the one he had crushed with the crystal.

                His head was to the floor, and the angle reminded him of too many horror movies to count. The situation even fit, too, with a badly injured monster hunting down the final survivor of its massacre, prepared to end what it had begun. The pile of bones behind him set the stage for the terrifying finale, even. It wouldn't be very impressive to be another corpse stacked in a heap, though. It closed the gap, dragging itself close enough for him to grab it with an arm if he so chose. The pain was breathtaking. It hurt, hurt so bad. It all went so fast.

                It roared, lifting itself to prepare the final stomp. As it came down, he lifted the mace from its resting place and set it as upright as he could, pulling his body impotently away from the hooves, while doing so. The shimmy put him just shy of the blow once more, this time so close that the tremors rattled his eardrums. The mace, and his hand holding it, were both smashed under the hoof. He had used his weaker left hand, a sacrifice for the final gambit. The mace did not crumple entirely, though, with the metal bulb entering the tough flesh like a barb. His hand was spared a complete pulping by the little bit of mace-head that stayed outside of the hoof. The pain this time made the last injury feel like a puny little scrape, the feeling of disjointed fingers, ground bones, and torn nerves, and it was just too much. If it were any other time, he was certain that this would be the point at which he just curled into a ball and bawled his eyes out. This wasn't going to be the end for him, though. It couldn't be.

                He threw the pain out with his old self, his extraneous feelings, out with the petty concerns of a normal person in a peaceful era. Pain would not serve him. The pain didn't really go away, but force of will was a potent thing. His brains ignored his wailing nerves and decided to focus on the ordeal ahead. He pulled back further, crawling, hardly able to see through his shaking and tear-stained eyes, but he found the last tool he'd need to end the thing once and for all.

                It was the second column of bone, still perched on the perilously balanced femurs and plate. The Mole-Taur was gaining on him, stumbling along, leaning mostly on its less-injured side. As it loomed over him, now just trying to snap at his neck or back and just end the fight, he pulled the nearest bone away. The collapse was instant, and suddenly, he was buried under pounds and pounds of Ossein and decrepit flesh. So was the beast. It struggled with the new pressure, not quite as powerful or rowdy as before. Surprise wasn't on his side anymore, but how weak it had grown would have to suffice.

                He dug his way up, ignoring the smell of decay and disgusting matter in contact with anywhere and everywhere he didn't want it, and began to tear into the beast. He just tore at it. It was bloody, stomach-wrenching, and so impossibly slow with just one hand, but he had teeth. He had legs and teeth and a hand and he used them to pry out all of the soft and squishy bits of the beast and rip and tear and hack and cleave at it from places not so well protected by the thick hide.

                Its thrashing stopped, but he didn't. He wouldn't let it go that easily.

_____

                Getting past the crocodile man had been easily the most dangerous part of her plan. Everything else wasn't too important, really. The climb down the cliff was therapeutic. She got a little scared when a hand-hold crumbled under her (miniscule) weight, but it was just a scare. A thrill.

                Catarina had always chased thrills. It was her life's work, from cradle to apparently imminent grave. Those thrills had taken many forms. When she was young, it was little rebellions. Convincing her friends to call her 'Kat' as short for Catarina when she knew her parents adored the name she gave her. Climbing trees and hopping across the creeks. As she got older, it was running just a bit too freely, dangerously, in the woods, or leaving 'conversations' with her boyfriend out for her impossibly devout Catholic mother to find, or just finding an excuse to find a bit of danger. She had contemplated picking up drugs or unsavory habits just for the adventure of it, but when she realized that it would limit her freedom in the long-run that thought went down the drain. Not quite with the reasoning her mom would have used, but that was just the destination. It was all about the journey.

                The journey was currently in absolute freefall. She had been taken alone and stripped nude, dropped in with a bunch of people she didn't know and certainly didn't want to see naked, or vice-versa. When she realized that there was no one telling her to cover up or even just anything to cover up with, that had excited her a bit and it had been 'OK'. The excitement died fast, though, and the embarrassment won over. She was naked and effectively alone in a group of strangers. Fear was something different, though, and the turbulence of a giant creature that couldn't get in was nothing compared to the thought of the people they had tossed out. Something like criminals, sure, but death was scary. It was the one adventure she didn't want to get a head-start on. Even if scaling that magnificent cliff did seem like fun.

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                That was the free-fall. Three people dead and gone, everyone just a bit paranoid, and now the people she had just started to really meet were all dead. No one had banded together when it was most necessary. She didn't, even using a casualty as a springboard for her own escape. Now she was all alone again, and instead of being surrounded by strangers, it was more like being dropped in the midst of the Amazon. She was scaling a cliff down to a place where the apex predator was a hundred meters long and had very, very sharp teeth. It was unlike anywhere she had ever been before.

                The excitement built in her gut as she thought it through, replacing the remorse and fear that had been gnawing at her.  She sped up her descent, eager to put the crocodile man far behind her and to see what was hiding below that dense canopy. She moved too fast for the tiny rocks and roots to even consider giving out, revving her inner João Garcia to an impressive tilt. If thrill-chasing and adventure-seeking did anything, it makes you nimble enough to evade the consequences. Some people would take that training mentally- pathological liars and salesmen, perhaps, but she had taken it in the most literal sense. She had fallen from trees at least five times in the past two years but she hadn't taken an injury in three.

Of course, she didn't want to fall this far. No amount of nimbleness could evade gravity altogether. As fast as she went, it was far from her top speed.

                When she heard the roaring of the crocodile man from the cave she decided that caution was quite overrated. She swore a dozen ways in a dozen languages and practically doubled her pace. By the time the beast made to the cliffs, she was too far down to see. Whatever delayed the beast had bought Kat enough time to evade its detection once more. He wasn't very pleased with that, tearing his way down the cliff at a precisely inhuman pace. By the time she made it to the tree-tops, the crocodile man had made it half way down. She could hear it now, tearing at the mountain face and bellowing. It hadn't seen her yet, so she shrunk aside, hoping the little crevice she found would buy her an escape.

                It wouldn't. He had the ape's scent-trail and it would not, could not escape him. He tore and tore and roared in his fury and closed the distance one claw at a time. Lizards were quite competent at climbing, and even better at descending.

                Whump.

                Whump was the sound of an impossibly massive snake-beast snapping up a crocodile man in one bite. The thing was silent in its approach compared to his furious descent and it took him in one go. It was certainly large enough, too. A dragon ate him. Kat only caught glances of its tail as it trailed onwards into the distance, along with its snack. She hoped that would be enough to kill the crocodile man, but it was impressively armed and dangerous. Maybe it would cut its way out, like they do in cartoons? She buried that thought and decided to focus on getting away from the improbably large snakes and spear-wielding crocodiles.

                She tipped her way out of the crevice, redoubling her efforts to reach the base. Quickly, the leaves and trunks fell away for the thick foliage of bushes and vines. The first thing that caught her attention was the crisscrossing trails left by the Dragons through the jungle floor. Each of the indents was thoroughly empty of foliage, and she could see quite clearly the innumerable creatures diving from side to side. It was like a verdant city where the cars had all disappeared, jaywalker after jaywalker hurrying from destination to destination. They were of all sizes and shapes, many familiar, and more unfamiliar. Feline beasts were the traffic directors, lumps of muscle that snapped up any animal that leap-frogged or ran or crawled along at the wrong time. Continuing with the analogy, the Dragons would be trucks- or trains.

                The creatures scattered, even the predators, and one of the beasts bowled through at speeds that would make bullet-trains blush. Clearly, the inhabitants had been conditioned to this. The few that didn't escape the tracks in time were snapped up by the thing's gaping maw. It was gone as fast as it had arrived, even more calamitous and sudden then they had been on the mountain's slope. Kat gulped, involuntarily. She wasn't quite as finely tuned as the animals, and it would be hard enough to evade them. What about the Dragons? She felt nervous, but it faded quickly for another wave of excitement. She had been so close to two of the monsters and she was still alive!

                What if she could ride one? Would it be like a rollercoaster? Could she do it? Would she just go flying, since they go so fast? Would the huge thing even know her tiny self was on-board? It might just feel a gnat and roll over to squish it off, or maybe it would just thrash about and fling her miles into the air. She decided to put that plan on hold for a later date, finishing the descent to the jungle floor. As far as she could tell, the animals were congregated nearer to the road, playing chicken with the Dragons for some odd reason. Perhaps they wanted a residue left behind by the creatures, or the best plants grew nearest to that lane of fertile soil completely unexhausted? In any case, she would have just a bit of reassurance while the Dragons were away.

                Her mother had always loved to weave. When their ancestors had moved to Brasil, they had learned to clean and weave and build and settle, and since then, it had been a tradition. Generation after generation retained bits and pieces of the family's heritage, but by the modern era- and far from the family's old lands- only the most basic of basics remained. Kat had never liked any of it, shying away from tradition as a matter of principle, but her mother made her learn to weave anyway. It wasn't like she'd need it, she said. No one needs to weave, she said. I'd rather learn something more practical, she said. Well, mother knew best. She was stranded in the Stone Age and twine was at least a thousand years away.

                Kat didn't have the luxury of cleaning and stripping the otherworldly ivy stems, but she would make due. She broke off the biggest leaves she could get from the massive trees and checked them for bugs; she yanked off and snapped the vines away, with great effort, and started to string the leaves through. It took too much concentration to be safe, but thankfully, nothing popped up. With that, she had a simple enough bandeau and skirt. It was a relief to at least have a little bit of coverage for her sensitive bits. Again, any novelty or adventure of going around in the nude wore off too quickly to matter. It was almost more satisfying to be the only civilized human in a world of nudists, she thought.

                The last thing she tried to make were little leaf shoes, but it didn't work out too well. The leaves were thick enough that they didn't rip as soon as she made a step, but they wouldn't help with rocks or sticks or porcupine. She thought that that could avert an unlucky encounter with a deadly insect, though, so she kept them on. She felt a little more human, a little more normal, with the outfit. It wasn't even too far from something she would have worn back at home.

                It wouldn't be safe to just sit around and marvel at clothes, though, so she started the trek. Their little group had never seen what was on the other side of the mountain.

 It was time to go pioneering.

The first stretch went off without a hitch. Kat covered plenty of ground, staying close to the mountain's steep face, and none of the creatures seemed too keen on leaving the trails. Another Dragon blew past, animals scattering. She continued on her way, careful not to get caught up in the scene again. She stumbled and climbed through the undergrowth and hill, only then realizing the problem. A Dragon went by. The animals didn't immediately go back, not at all. The realization was late, but it wasn't too late for her to start scaling her way back up towards the treeline. She could hear the thud of one of the cat-beasts, no doubt hoping to snag Kat when her back was turned. It scrambled up after her, claws scraping dirt and rocks.

                She was fast, but it had gained quite a bit of ground from the leap towards her. Cats were avid climbers. If she were to race it up a tree, it would be her loss every time. This was an eroding mountain-face, though, and it wasn't built for this sort of diagonal dash. Even still, it snapped at her heels. She finally reached the near-vertical cliff-face, reminiscent of the one that she had climbed down before. Heaving her way up, the first few handholds had a nice surface she could perch in. The cat-beast tried some small leaps, and she kicked at it. That was a mistake. Sure, she had hit it in the nose once, but it had nearly got a hold of her at the angle. Little victories weren't worth dying over.

                When she stopped kicking, it decided to just chase her up the cliff-face. Kat was caught off-guard, and she had to hustle to get to the next decent platform. She climbed from rock and ledge and root and cliff, until finally, the frustrated creature just gave up. She called and whooped at it, celebrating her triumph. She was raced a massive tiger through an alien jungle and kicking its ass! It was a caliber above any of the petty little adventures she had at home. The bliss of it made the danger feel just a little bit less real.