The morning after the frenzied construction effort, Adon was tired and out of sorts.

Even though I don’t actually sleep, per se, it seems that late nights still take their toll.

But it was worth it. Beside him, supporting its own weight and gently moving with the breeze, stood a very rudimentary spider web—er, caterpillar’s web! Assessed objectively, it looked like a spider’s web might have looked after a cat swiped its paw through it and tore pieces of it away. The classic Y-shaped frame was present, but most of the additional strands that made a web effective for capturing insects were missing.

It ended up looking a bit like a couple of wire hangers tangled together.

It looks like the spider who made it was drunk, Adon thought. But he still felt a warm surge of pride to be standing next to it. My web is standing. I made it all by myself, in one night. I only got advice, no other help making it!

When Goldie strode down from where she’d been resting in her web, she was effusive in her praise.

Great first web, Adon! she thought at him. Structure is perfect. Pretty big framework too. You should have seen first web I made. Maybe you should have been spider.

Do you, um, really think so? he sent. I don’t think it will catch insects, though.

Goldie gave it a long, appraising look.

No, she thought slowly, clearly reluctantly. No, probably not.

I mostly did it for the experience, anyway, Adon sent. Just to see if I could learn to make a web. I didn’t want to give up halfway through.

The spider nodded. No need to worry about food, anyway, Adon. You have me! My web catches insects every day. More than I eat. Much happier to share with you than thief spiders.

Adon swallowed. The idea was tempting. Goldie was offering him room and board, essentially. But how would he accrue the kind of Evolution Points he wanted to if he was always eating her food, using her web? And how would this be different from his old life as a fat freeloader?

I have plenty of space, she went on, oblivious to the thought process quietly chugging along in the back of Adon’s mind.

I want to do my own hunting, Goldie, Adon sent. I should probably go out and get something pretty soon, actually. Before I deplete your food any more. I’ve gotten pretty good at finding food, you know. I really appreciate the offer, though.

Oh, um. Sure. It was hard for Adon to be certain, but he thought his refusal might have offended the spider. He tried to change the subject to something else, but she said she had to look at repairing another part of the web, where a few bugs had landed next to each other the other day. Then she strode briskly out of sight.

Adon cut off Telepathy and was left alone with his own thoughts. His own doubts and anxieties. Did I already screw this up? he wondered. He wished he had the social skills and courage to reopen the conversation and change the outcome. But the best he could think to do was leave Goldie alone for a while, and hope that she understood he was not trying to reject her by refusing further help.

I’m never going to be good with girls, he thought. No matter whether they have skins or exoskeletons. It would be nice, though, if I could have one friend without screwing it up.

The only bright side of the failed evening project and disastrous morning conversation was that Adon felt he had learned some things from his web construction effort. Since he was going hunting, he planned to put those lessons into practice.

As Adon had previously noted, he was primarily an ambush predator. This was partially because he lacked the brawn to overcome most of his enemies in a straight fight, but at this point, he had actually invested enough to become good at it. He had Color Change for near invisibility. Venom Spines that he could launch with Spine Shot.

With what he’d learned about web construction from his long, painful practice last night, Adon thought he had essentially added another upgrade to his arsenal. He began spinning silk threads and quickly wove them into a net small enough to hold in his forelegs.

He held it loosely in front of himself and examined it visually.

Perfect, he thought. It was so much less resource intensive than making a full spider-style web. Quick and easy by comparison. And he thought he would be able to use it well.

Adon activated Color Change to make himself effectively invisible again, and he walked out from under Goldie’s web through the gap that separated the bottom from the ground.

Need to find the strongest predator I can capture in this net, he thought. It was a task demanding enough to justify all the effort he’d invested last night. And to consume all the focus he wasn’t using to maintain Color Change.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Adon walked for an hour, but he had only begun to get hungry by the time he spotted his prey. There was a lizard on the path in front of him, a foot away. It was actually around Adon’s size, and he thought it might not be an adequate challenge to really test the efficacy of the net.

But he was getting hungry. The lizard was just the right size to fill his stomach completely. And Adon had not yet eaten a reptile. Might as well check that off the bucket list. He might even get those sweet bonus Evolution Points for killing off a species that was above him on the food chain.

Adon began closing the distance, approaching from the front, Color Change still active. The lizard seemed to just be sunning itself, moving very slowly toward a nearby plant, without a care in the world. Adon was pretty sure it couldn’t see him.

It looks like this should be pretty easy, he thought. He stepped up to within a few inches, and then he froze.

What’s up with the way that leaf just moved? he thought. The leaf looked to be attached to a nearby plant stem, leaning down only an inch from the lizard. Slightly closer to the lizard now that it had moved. It had seemed to sway with the breeze—only there was no breeze. Is there some predator behind there?

He had a moment to think of retreat. But before Adon had time to step back and get out of range, the leaf spun around, and he realized that it was no leaf.

Where there had seemingly been a piece of plant life, there was a tall green figure—almost twice Adon’s size!—with long, hook-like front limbs. Its elongated lower body looked a bit like a leaf, but Adon was surprised he hadn’t seen through the camouflage sooner. This was no plant. It was a horrendous monster. In a single fluid motion, the creature had turned and sprung into action.

Adon could only barely track those quick movements with his eyes. Now the monster gripped the lizard’s neck and front legs in long spines that grew on those vicious front limbs, and Adon saw big, lethal mandibles chomp down on the back of the lizard’s neck.

The unsuspecting creature wiggled and writhed under the monster’s sudden and unwanted attentions. Then the lizard’s resistance became a wild flailing.

As quickly as the battle had begun, it stopped. The lizard lay still. Though Adon could not see clearly quite what had happened behind the monster’s long forelimbs and large head, he saw enough. A puddle of red liquid slowly grew underneath the area where the lizard’s head should be.

The area where Adon guessed the head no longer existed.

He watched in mute horror as the creature began messily devouring the recently deceased lizard. Adon felt frozen. Unable to move. Incapable of looking away.

If I had ambushed that lizard just now, he thought, would I have been attacked by that creature instead?

Live by the ambush, die by the ambush, it seemed, was the law of the jungle. Or garden.

Adon only became more aware of his own body again when he noticed the puddle of blood slowly oozing toward him. Not wanting to get any on his skin or spines, and perhaps become visible again, he beat a slow retreat backward. He stopped when he figured he was far enough out of range that the blood wouldn’t reach him no matter how long he stood there.

And his eyes refocused on the predator before him.

Identify.

Thorny Leafy Mantis (Female)

I guess I remember that was a type of creature that existed in my old worlds, he thought hesitantly. The key question was: could he kill her? And should he take the risk of trying?

The creature was fundamentally much more intimidating to Adon than the bat he had fought the night before last. Her head looked like it belonged to a predator. A green triangle of death. But the mantis also had weaknesses that the bat hadn’t been burdened with.

Adon was guessing she couldn’t fly—or if she could, not very well—because she was acting as a ground-based predator. The front limbs didn’t actually look deadly. The spines didn’t seem to be sharp like Adon’s were. They were just a tool to hold prey in place. The only deadly body part seemed to be the head, which had larger, more ferocious-looking mandibles than Adon’s.

If I have the element of surprise, I think it’s definitely winnable, he assessed. The situation is actually perfect to use the net. If I slip it over her head, that should make it difficult or impossible for her to bite me, and blind her.

As he had these thoughts, the mantis stepped backward, dragging the lizard with her as she moved. She seemed to be returning to her prior position by the plant. But why there? Why wouldn’t she move on from where she just killed something? Does she just know the area?

A suspicion began to arise in Adon’s mind.

Yes, he thought. I’ll risk my life and try it. Worst case scenario, she might rip off a couple of my limbs, but as long as that’s not my head, I can heal. And if I can get out of her grip, I’m still an invisible creature. A getaway should be a no-brainer. Adon wasn’t thinking he would have to do this, but experience had taught him that a plan of retreat was perhaps the most important part of one of his plans of attack.

He snuck closer to the mantis, edging around the puddle of slowly drying lizard blood on the path. The mantis’s body was turned back the way it had been before, so the lower part looked like a leaf attached to the plant she stood against if viewed from the correct angles. The illusion was broken by the jerky movements of her body as she continued devouring the dead lizard.

Adon walked around to the opposite side of the plant and began climbing.

He had a vision in mind for how this would go, and the ideal scenario in his mind required him to start out around head height relative to the mantis.

He reached around the height he estimated the mantis would extend to once she straightened up to her full height. And he waited for her to finish devouring her prey.

As Adon stood there for several minutes, listening to the sounds of the mantis ripping meat and bone apart with her mandibles, he looked down to the base of the plant. Wrapped around the stem, he saw a large brown object. He didn’t know the word for it, but it looked like the natural world’s version of a container. Perhaps something that had been produced from the mantis’s own body, considering the bizarre and often horrifying ways he’d experienced nature in this world.

Identify.

Mantis Egg Ootheca

That’s the jackpot, he thought. There was the prize Adon had been imagining he might find. What he was hoping to win by killing the mother.

There was a movement in the corner of his vision. He looked back toward the mantis and saw that she was sucking the last bit of lizard into her mouth: the long, scrawny tail.

She started to straighten her posture—and Adon braced himself to attack.