The velociraptor dug with his front claws at the base of an enormous kapok tree, snarling under his breath. In front of him loomed a large hole, about half as wide as his feathery, German Shepard-sized body. Three quokkas cowered inside of the burrow: two females, and one joey.

If you’ve never seen a quokka, they’re just about the cutest things on earth: an Australian marsupial, relatives of the kangaroo, with soulful beady eyes and fluffy round faces. They almost always look like they’re smiling. Right now, though, these quokkas were cringing in terror as the raptor dug furiously at the entrance to their hidey hole.

My belly slid quietly over the forest floor. I was angled against the wind, staring down a narrow tunnel at the raptor’s bobbing tail. The other sounds of the forest faded to a dull roar as I froze, one paw lifted, staring straight ahead. Waiting for the perfect moment.

The raptor didn’t hear or smell me. With a screech of impatience, it lunged forward against the opening of the burrow, snapping its narrow jaws inside. The quokkas chittered. I lunged out, tentacles rising in a silent cloud around my body.

Two of the obsidian blades took the raptor from either side as I leaped onto its back and clamped my jaws down on its neck. The dinosaur squealed in panic, a sound that cut as its thin feathery neck broke with a wet snap and the birdlike body went limp in my jaws.

“Jeez. Talk about overkill.” I retracted the needles and pulled the tentacles back, peering into the burrow. The quokka had open-mouthed expressions of raw animal horror, frozen in place.

“Don’t worry, little guys. You’re too small for me to really worry about. Besides… you’re way too cute for munchy-munch time.” I tried to talk telepathically, but there was no sign they understood. Momma Quokka hugged her joey to her chest. The other one shat itself in fear.

I decided to spare the little fluffernuts the sights and smells of my dinner, and dragged the velociraptor up by the neck, looking from side to side. Then, without hardly thinking about it, I pulled it up a nearby tree until I reached a comfortable looking branch. Meal with a view – and no interruptions. Nice.

[You have discovered: Velociraptor. You can now identify this creature with Keen Senses.]

[You have new Items: Velociraptor Claw, Dino Hide x 10, Small Dinosaur Carcass (Poor Condition)]

[You gain 3 EXP.]

Disappointingly, the little raptor didn’t taste like steak. It was stringy and chewy and not nearly as good as Argus Pheasant meat. There also wasn’t nearly as much muscle and fat on it, and while I was able to eat pretty much all of it, the dinosaur only filled my Hunger meter halfway. That wasn’t good enough. I was a rapidly growing Noodles, and I needed to fill the tank.

I clambered down the tree, licking my chops, and turned my head into the wind. The scent of some interesting warm-blooded critter caught in my nostrils. I was about to put my head down and follow it when the sound of someone sobbing blew down on the wind. It was a full-blown ‘wuuu huu huuu huuuuu’ kind of sob, too. Someone bawling their eyes out.

The spines along my back lifted, and I rumbled in my chest. Mysterious crying in a hostile environment? Smelled like a trap.

I crept forward, melding into the deep brush and staying low as my heart began to pound. But was it fear, or excitement? Damsel in Distress traps were one of the oldest tricks in the book when it came to PKing players and stealing their gear. If it was a two-player setup, they were about to get a lot more than they bargained for.

The sound of rushing water receded, bringing the crying into focus. It didn’t sound especially human. The area here was thick with tall, straight, smooth-barked trees. Perfect place for a sniper’s nest. I bellycrawled to one of them, then dug my claws in and used all eight limbs to climb up to the crown. Now that I had the ‘four legs, four tentacles’ configuration worked out, climbing was nearly as easy as walking.

Once I reached the top, I anchored myself on several branches and leaned out, snorting out a cloud of humid air in surprise. It wasn’t a human crying in the middle of a clearing. It was an amorphous silvery blob of slime about the size of a goat. The blob was stuck inside of an energy field generated by three pylons half-hidden in the brush. They looked a bit like Tesla coils – weird, given there was supposedly no advanced tech in the Jungle. The lithe, formless mass of slime inside the trap was lunging from one side of the field to the other, then falling back to the center to sob. I wasn’t entirely sure how it was making noise, but it sounded kind of unnatural. Like a recording of a woman… or a mimic.

My nostrils flexed as I took in the scene. There was only the one narrow trail, no other broken underbrush. I couldn’t see, smell or sense anyone else around. No tree platforms. Little in the way of good ambush sites. Someone had come here, set up a trap, and left.

Hmm. Warily, I slid back down the trunk to the ground, and padded out into the open to get a better look at one of the trap pylons. Suddenly, the slime tensed - then sagged to the ground and let out piercing cry of fear.

“Whoa there, jello-mold. No need to freak out. I’m not in the business of eating folks like you.” The force field was so intense that it sizzled the beads of moisture off my hide when I got close. The burned-plastic smell of ozone bored into my sinuses.

[Plasma Legion Trap (Owned by: N. Kaban.) Integrity: 9802/10,000]

I re-read the name. ‘Kaban’ sounded Russian, or maybe Georgian – the country, not the state - but it didn’t trigger any memories.

The blob quivered warily.

“Alright… Hang on to your panties, kid. I’ll take a look and see if I can do anything.” I knew it couldn’t hear my thoughts, but it made me feel less tense to talk. I paced around the pylons. First thing I tried was to just pick it up into my inventory.

[You must be Level 25 to use this item.]

Crap. That was a lot of levels I didn’t have.

“Okay… how about…?” I picked up a decent-sized boulder, and hurled it at the pylon.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

[Plasma Trap Integrity: 9988/10,000]

Alright: that was progress. The thing could take damage. With the memory of the raptor firmly in mind, I kept half an eye over my shoulder as I dug at the side of the energy dome. I discovered that it was actually a sphere that went underground to stop the captured Legion from tunneling its way out. The blob seemed to simply give up as I scratched and paced. She – I somehow thought of it as a she – sunk down into a silent, trembling mass.

“Well, shit. I’m out of ideas.” I huffed and sat down. “No one ever said Noodles was a genius. To be honest with you, kid, I don’t really have a PhD. Well, I do, but it stands for ‘Pretty Huge Dick’. Not Postgraduate… Human… Doctor-Man? What the hell does the ‘H’ in PhD stand for, anyway?”

I snapped back to reality to see that that the slime had tentatively extruded a pseudopod. She was jabbing it frantically it in the direction of one of the pylons.

I shot back up to my feet. “Wait. You can hear me?”

“Uuu!” The slime bounced up and down, rippling.

Holy shit. This changed everything. I focused on the slime and thought identifying thoughts. The dry Slavic info-voice dutifully replied.

[You have identified new Lesser Legion: Limne (Spirit/Water/Acid). This delicate and common Legion mindlessly devours all it comes across. It has high resistance to physical damage, but its soft body and low intelligence makes it unsuited to the intense combat.]

Low intelligence? This thing was smarter than every other Legion and most of the humans I’d met here so far.

“What do you want me to do?” I split my tentacles and brandished them like a hydra over my back. “Try thinking it at me with your mouth-words.”

The blob swelled up, vibrating with effort. I felt… something. A push against my mind from the outside. It sounded like a badly tuned radio. After a couple seconds, the Limne oozed back down, radiating disappointment.

“Uuu.” She twisted from side to side in a pretty decent imitation of a head shake.

“Don’t worry about it. If you can hear me, we’re already halfway there.” I paced around the trap, growling in confusion as I tried to figure out what she wanted.

The slime put out two little blobby ‘arms,’ and mimed digging in front of the pylon.

“OH! Right. Got it.” I bounded over to that position and began excavating. There was a small square-foot radius around the base of the trap that was invulnerable to damage, but the rest of the soil around it was fair game.

I dug around it like a dog, scrabbling at the mud with my foreclaws, flinging it back under my belly. At any moment, I expected a band of jack-booted assholes to come riding out of the jungle on their god-tier mounts, guns blazing. My Stamina burned down like a fuse as I searched for the bottom – and found it about three feet down. The device had little ‘boots’ that looked like they were designed to hold bolts so the post could be anchored onto rock.

Once the pylon was basically just standing in a muddy hole, I curled a tentacle around the big rock I’d thrown at it before, lined it up, and chucked it as hard as I could.

The rock – about the size of a man’s torso – smashed into the steel and knocked it out of alignment a little. As it did, the invisible forcefield sparked and came into view. A wash of heat flooded out through the clearing.

“This might actually work. Dig down. Find some cover.” I ran over and picked up the rock again.

“Ohh-ohh.” The Limne melted down into the soil.

This time, I wielded the stone like a sledgehammer, smashing it into the wonky pylon. There was a bang and a flash. The next thing I knew, I was lying twenty feet away in a daze, ears ringing, claws covered in mud and soot. The rock had shattered, smoking pieces of it strewn around me. I had a flame icon pulsing red in my HUD. A status effect. I was Burned.

The forcefield was gone. A big black scar across the charred ground was all that remained.

“Shit.” I staggered back up to all four feet and shook myself, wincing as my own scales rubbed against a raw, burned patch of flesh. I groaned as I saw the blasted foliage all around us. The cute little slime was dead. All that for that.

Something slithered in the underbrush behind me.

My lizard brain screamed ‘BUG!’. Before I had a chance to remember that I was a shark-faced killing machine, I yelped and scrambled away from the metallic hiss, landing on the ends of my tentacles with my feet all hanging off the ground.

It was the slime, now distended like a cobra made from mercury. It swelled up to a trembling seven-foot pillar of shimmering fluid and hung there. A few tense seconds passed.

“So what are you gonna do?” I narrowed my eyes at it. “Fight me? Do a dance? Play ‘Fuck, Marry, Pass’?”

“Uuuh…” The fight seemed to drain out of the Limne. It sank back down until it was little more than a puddle rolling over the dirt. “Nuuu.”

“Suits me.” I dropped back down to all fours. “You understand me alright?”

The puddle shyly bounced up and down.

“And you aren’t gonna try and pick a fight?”

More bouncing. Faster, now.

“Good call.” The punch-puds sagged from their strike position. “You had to be a human like me, once upon a time. You got a name? Anything you remember?”

She twisted from side to side, the universal human-slime gesture for ‘no’.

“Give it a try anyway,” I urged.

The slime burbled silently for a few seconds before stiffening with excitement. “Luu… luu?“

Its name was Lulu. There was no way I could hurt this thing. “Well… nice to meet you, Lulu. I’m Noodles.”

Before we could continue the pleasantries, a thunderous roar echoed through the jungle, followed by the sensation of the ground bucking under our feet. I arched my back up and froze. So did the slime. The vibration happened again. Footsteps. Something big enough to shake the earth.

Lulu began to urgently point to the south. “EEEK!”

“Yeah. Good idea.” I spun around and was about to pick her up when Lulu sprang at me. She hit my chest with a wet splat, tendrils of liquid gripping, clinging, and spreading over my skin like a weird gooey vest. She was careful not to get in the way of my legs as I took off into a sprint.

“Dammit, why the hell am I always running away from shit that wants to eat me!?” I groaned as I limp-ran through the trees. My HP sat at 47% from the Burn status, and my injured leg slowed us down. I didn’t know if Angel had the right herbs to fix burns. What I did know was the name of the dinosaur barreling trees down like toothpicks as it charged us. It was a T-Rex. A Level 22 T-Rex, covered in feathers like an ostrich. It had a great big toothy head and tiiiiny little arms, and it was well and truly aggroed on my shiny black ass. There was no way we were going to outpace it. But I couldn’t risk luring it back to Angel.

We nearly collided with a small ledge that loomed suddenly out of the jungle undergrowth. My leg buckled when I tried to jump, so I planted my tentacles into the soft ground and used them to propel us up and over, whirling around to face the dinosaur. Bellowing, it shoved a grove of smaller trees aside, put its head down, and charged.

“No more running, Lulu. This is the end of the road.” I tensed, muscles thrumming… and at the last moment, sprang into the air as the dinosaur rammed its skull right into the side of the ledge. I landed on its shoulder, grasping clawfuls of feathers as it shook its head and took a cumbersome step back. While it was stunned, I made sure I had a good grip, then reared my tentacles back and plunged them down into its thick hide like hypodermic needles.

[You use Soul Drain! 495 Reduced Damage! You gain +5 Strength!]

[T-Rex: 24,505/25,000 HP]

The expected abilities did not appear. It took me a second to realize why. This thing wasn’t a Legion.

Bellowing as it spun, the rex jerked from side to side to shake us off. I was glad for that strength bonus, because the dino was surprisingly fast. I’d only just got my bearings when it put its head down and charged for the cliff again. For a second, I thought it had glitched out and was going to give itself another concussion. Instead, it twisted broadside and rammed ME into the rocks.

[You take 1880 impact damage!]

“ARRGH! FUCK!” Crushing pain ripped the air from my lungs. Bones creaked, and something gave way with a wet pop deep in my chest. I slashed and snarled on my way to the ground, but landed awkwardly – and looked up to see a pair of gaping jaws descending toward my face.