[Lulu has taken 250 damage. Your Lesser Legion has been Impaled. 50 damage every second.]

"Lulu!" I took a step forward, mouth open, but the damage was done. The Limne wriggled frantically, cloudy bursts of ichor rippling through her mass as she tore herself on the spear hafts.

"She's a liquiform! It doesn't look like they hit her core, so... tell her to calm down, relax, and try and flow around them," Angel voiced, her tone wavering with her urgency.

Lulu heard her and understood before I could back up the order. The slime shuddered, then sagged and began to flow around the spears. Moment by moment, she freed herself until finally, she coalesced back into a miserable-looking ball of slime on solid ground.

"So what did we learn today?" I bent down to sniff her as Angel uncorked a potion. "'Don't go charging off into traps. Right?"

"Uuu..." Lulu groaned, shuddering as Angel stuck the whole bottle into Lulu's mass. The Limne absorbed it and began to suck the contents out. It was weird to admit, but as her HP rose, I started feeling better. Watching Lulu get skewered... it had scared me.

I looked back at Angel, and felt a pang of fear as my mind's eye flashed with the image of her impaled on spears like the ones that had nailed Lulu. Limne were weak by legion-standards, but all legions were exponentially tougher than all humans here. But Angel... she was just human. Her HP was a fraction of mine, her armor a fraction of mine. She only had one heart, one brain. The Whiphorse had nearly gotten her, and these things… they’d have been an insta-kill. Suddenly, nine lives didn't seem like enough.

"There's more traps. Let me go ahead," I signed to Angel telepathically. "You two follow behind. I've got some killer instincts going on... if I'm not distracted, I can detect most traps."

"Got it." Angel motioned her agreement and didn't argue as she fell in behind me - and not for the first time, I found myself admiring how level-headed she was. A lot of people would have argued, postured, put up some kind of petty fight. A lot of women - hell, a lot of men - would have gotten bratty at being ordered around by the likes of me. Alternatively, they'd have cowered behind me like a shield, submissive with fear. Angel was neither of those things, and while she smelled nervous, she mustered her courage. I could watch her mind work as it quickly and practically evaluated the circumstances and decided for herself to trust me and let me lead this time. It was... refreshing. Really damn refreshing, to be able to trust someone like this. And now I thought about it, there hadn't been a single time that Angel had deliberately caused me any drama. And I… I admired her, didn’t I? She was gorgeous. Smart, sweet, strong.

Damn. I was falling for this girl. Hard.

‘Shit, man…’ I thought to myself, tail sagging behind me. ‘You promised you wouldn’t think of her that way. So what if she’s been flirting with you a bit? There’s no way it’s going to work. She’s human, and you’re… well. You’re a fucking monster.’

My ears were still ringing from the epiphany and all its implications when we found the door with the scuttling behind it. Locked and trapped. I growled, rumbling low in my chest with warning as Lulu tried to poke around the doorframe. "We need to try the key we found on this, but I don't like it. The whole thing is boobytrapped."

"Can you tell what kind of trap it is?" Angel signed back.

I snorted a blast of hot air, but there was nothing but a baleful orange aura and the same icon I'd seen when I'd encountered traps in the past. "Nope. It's just fucky. Don't smell poison this time. It's some kind of mechanical trap."

"If it's a mechanical trap, then there's really only three possible mechanisms," Angel signed. "The key acting as a trigger, some kind of motion sensor, or a mechanical toggle that flips when the door is opened. I'm going to say option one is the most likely. Take a step back and let me look."

It was my time to let her lead. As she advanced past me to examine the door, I couldn't help but marvel at how easily we switched roles. It felt so... natural. As I gazed at Angel’s perfect ass, Lulu sidled up. She chortled and shoved at me gently.

"Don't you say a damn word," I muttered to her telepathically. "Not one damn word."

Lulu made a sound disturbingly like a wolf-whistle, then giggled to herself.

"Fucking hell. I literally just admitted to myself that I’m crushing on this lady. Is it really that obvious?" My tail began to lash behind me.

"Ooo," Lulu affirmed. “Foo a whoole noo.”

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"Well, don't you fucking breathe a word of it to her. I'm a damn dog-panther-shark-dragon bullshit monster. I'm pretty sure Angel isn't into bestiality, and besides that, I made a promise that I wouldn't ever creep on her, you know?"

Lulu crooned in agreement. She was humming with the need to talk to me, counsel me... but while her verbal skills had improved, they just weren't there yet. She needed to eat more people.

"Okay, I think I've figured this out," Angel voiced so Lulu could also understand her. "I'm ninety percent sure that what you're picking up is a key-activated trapdoor. So if I give you the key and you reach out-"

"Can't use keys." I cut her off with a gesture of head and claw.

"Oh. Dammit." Angel frowned. "There's a slight seam on the ground that I'm pretty sure is the trapdoor. It's about six foot around. Too big for me to reach over."

"Yuu!" Lulu bounced from side to side, then hopped over to Angel and ran around her like an excited, slimy puppy before she wrapped herself around the woman's slender waist... and dragged her up the wall. Angel made a choking sound that was half strangled gasp, half laugh. But hell, it worked. I watched in amusement as Lulu lowered Angel, Mission-Impossible style, toward the door. Angel had to wiggle to find a position where she could both brace her rifle and use the key. I tensed as she inserted it, wary of poison despite not being able to smell it... and backpedaled as the floor right in front of the door gave way, and a square forest of spears shot down from the ceiling right above it. Lulu squeaked and pulled Angel in against the wall, flattening over her as the spikes shot past barely inches from them both. A crank turned inside of the ceiling, and the spears withdrew back as the door slid open.

I rumbled, tentacles unfurling as I set myself in front of the entryway, which revealed... a crab. A crab about the size of a pony, white, with long claws covered in what looked like fur. A human Gladiator had every right to be horrified by this [Juvenile Lightning Crab], but all I saw was dinner.

"YEEEHAW CRABSTICKS!" I flung myself forward, over the hole and into the room. The burned plastic reek of ozone hit my nose as I pounced: electricity. Lightning coiled on its hairy claws, making the filaments stand on end. As I wrapped the tentacles around it, trying to find a weak point in its armor, it struggled and zapped me.

[You take 1919 enhanced Air damage. HP: 8,652/10,571]

"Ow! You sonofva-!" We tumbled across the floor, legs and pinchers waving. I zoned in on what had to be a weak point: the place where the crab's claw arm connected to its body. Jaws gaping, I lunged for it - and was rewarded with a satisfying crunch of teeth through chitin. The crab chittered, swinging us around as it got its feet under it, but once my teeth were locked, they were locked. I thrashed my body from side to side like an alligator, dealing damage every second as my tentacle claws skidded over its shell.

There was a sharp stab of pain as the other claw caught one of them, crushing it - but then the other three tentacles found the crab's eye-stalks. It screeched as the needle points ejected into the soft flesh at the base of the stalk, sending jets of pale blue ichor into the air.

Behind me, I saw Lulu cringing behind Angel as she sighted down, trying to get a clear shot. But it was close quarters. I thought to snarl at Lulu to get in here, but even as I had the thought, the crab's white shell turned blue as it built up charge, then released an EMP blast that filled the room. The force of it ripped me off the crab and sent me flying, and I had a moment where I realized how the Whiphorse must’ve felt as I took triple damage. Lulu and Angel were thrown back outside of the doorway.

"Weirdest. Fire boss dungeon. EVER." My tentacles and tail whipped around and caught me before I smashed into the wall, five long bladed claws supporting my bodyweight with all four limbs off the ground.

I didn't bother to put my feet down. Instead, I used tentacles and tail, turning and stalking forward on my claw tips. My skin tensed - and then ejected a cloud of needles at speed. The projectiles hit the crab in a dozen places, cracking its armor. Behind me, I glimpsed Angel lining up, and scuttled out of the way so she could take the shot. One, then two bullets impacted the crab's underbelly at less than twenty feet, sending pieces of chitin flying in a cloud of misty blue blood. As the crab reeled, I struck - dropping to my feet, leaping forward to roll the crab onto its back, and then goring it. My clawed feet raked the broken shell apart until it reached the meat... and then it was over, with Noodles standing triumphantly atop a very, very dead crab.

"Oww. My HP is down to a bit over five k. But hey, I think we're getting good at this." I hopped lightly to the ground as my stomach rumbled. There was only a moment of hesitation before I turned back and began to tear the crab to pieces, digging under the shell for the sweet white meat. "If Karkinos is just a bigger, Fire-themed version of these guys, it'll be a piece of cake."

"I wouldn't count on it," Angel signed as she moved past me into the room. Now our crustacean nemesis was defeated, I actually had a chance to make note of what was in here. Pipes, again - lots and lots of pipes. They connected to some kind of primitive contraption made of wood, stone and bronze that barely qualified as a machine. Angel went over to it, circling as her eyes darted from place to place.

"Is that the pump?" I asked, as I snarfed down some claw meat.

"Sure is." She signed back to me as she crouched down. "And I'm pretty sure you turn it on... here."

She did something out of my line of sight, but that caused a deep rumble to pass through the floor. The gears on the machine crunched as they locked together. Water rushed through the pipes, loud enough that Lulu cringed as she frantically scooted over to me. After a few seconds, it hit the pump. The gears started to turn with a steady grinding, chugging sound. It was deafeningly loud.

"There's a water gauge down here. A bobber." Angel pointed down, showing me where a cork bobbed inside of a wide stone tube now half-full of water. "There's markings in here that show the half and max fill lines. It’s at fifty percent, so I think there's a second pump."

"Well, let's go do what we do best, then." I tossed my head back and snapped my jaws in satisfaction. This was the only way I liked my bugs: oceanic and delicious.

"Muuduu?" Lulu poked at the crab's carcass curiously.

"You got it, kid. Murder she wrote."