Adon had a moment, as he began to fall, to congratulate himself.

I made the right call, he thought. He had spent so much of his previous life avoiding even moderately stressful situations, he hadn’t really known how he would react. But it seemed like his new body didn’t freeze up quite as much as his last one.

As Adon fell, his body drew near to the monster that had forced him to jump. The creature sprang into action. Adon could barely track its movements, but he could read the Ladybug Larva’s intentions and see which way it was moving. The monster was trying to slash him, aiming to inflict a fatal wound even if it wouldn’t actually get to eat its prey.

How spiteful, he thought. You’d better watch yourself, Ladybug. I’ll be back!

As he had those thoughts, Adon attempted to fold and twist his body in midair to avoid the long claws that sought to disembowel him. But the predator was awfully quick, and there was only so much Adon could do to dodge while he was in midair. He didn’t have wings, after all.

Although he would later imagine that his aerial acrobatics had affected the depth and length of the cut, he couldn’t avoid the slash that slit his side open. The Ladybug Larva’s claw traced a long gash down Adon’s right side. Then the two separated, Adon’s body pulled out of the monster’s way by gravity.

I think he just grazed me, Adon thought, relieved.

A few seconds later, he started to think differently.

As he fell, Adon felt the wind probing at his wound, pulling at the two sides of the opening. Though the cut was less painful than he would’ve expected, the sensation from the air told him that it was quite a long laceration. Adon waited for his vision to begin darkening at the edges.

He imagined he would pass out from the pain, then perhaps strike a hard object and either suffer a concussion or a fatal head trauma. Then some sort of ground-based predator would find him, and he’d be right back in front of the Goddess again, begging for one more chance.

But his eyes remained as clear as ever.

Which wasn’t saying much, but it was still good news!

It seems like my caterpillar body isn’t quite the same as my human body. A single shallow gash, even if it cuts across almost the full length of my body, isn’t going to take me out of commission. He had thought he would lose consciousness or go into shock. If that wasn’t going to happen…

Adon started looking out for something he might grab to break his fall.

But it was a very short distance he was falling, in objective terms. The ground raced up at him. There were no leaves or stems within reach.

Maybe I jumped just a little too far, he thought. But then he remembered the intense movements of that Ladybug Larva, and he shook his head. Another millimeter or two back, and I’d be dead.

As he crashed into the earth, Adon protected his head with his front legs as best he could. He still expected to black out for a while, but his new body surprised him again with its durability. Instead of splattering against the ground, he just bounced lightly, rolled from his momentum, and came to rest a short distance from the base of the plant he’d been born on.

Adon felt far from interested in moving around, with the long gash in his side, but he was also entirely uninjured from the fall. He lay in place for a few seconds in stunned stillness.

Well. How about that?

He had forgotten the square-cube law. Tiny organisms like himself benefited from that little rule of mathematics and biomechanics. He was so small that terminal velocity wasn’t particularly fast for him. Even if it had felt faintly terrifying as he fell. His fear was a little embarrassing now, but he quickly pushed the memory of it from his mind.

Hm. Now that’s over, what have I learned? First, at my size, I literally can’t be injured by a fall from any height. Even if I land poorly. Which he probably had. If he’d realized how durable he was against fall damage, he wouldn’t have bothered shielding his head, which was probably fairly well protected, using his legs, which were probably a little more brittle. And Adon had another reason not to pay for the “Size Enhancement I” Adaptation, though he doubted it would've been a very big size increase anyway.

Adon felt a ticklish sensation in the area of his long cut, and he saw an ant. It freaked him out a bit, but he resisted the urge to recoil in horror for the moment. What is it doing?

The ant had poked at the wound along Adon’s abdomen, which was what gave him the freaky sensation that almost felt like someone was tickling him. Then it probed his body around the wound. A poke here. A nudge there.

What was it doing? Trying to start a fight?

That didn’t quite make sense. The touches were rather gentle. Curious.

Once the surprise faded, Adon’s instinctive fear melted away with it. Relative to even his newborn size, this ant was small. The size of a large dog next to a particularly large human. Given the size of their respective bodies, and the fact that they were both insects with mandibles for killing and eating their prey, Adon was fairly certain he would win any fight. He couldn’t even see anything that looked like a stinger on this little fellow, although Adon’s vision was far from reliable.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Still, even with his wound, Adon should have the advantage. He could keep the ant away from the tear in his body with some of his extra legs, then curl around and chop the ant’s head off with his mandibles.

Adon was feeling very confident, when the ant turned and began walking away from him.

Wait, what? Did he just realize he couldn’t win and decide to leave? Hold on, I might need that food. Adon had just remembered he was supposed to hunt other insects himself, so he could get Evolution Points and have his revenge on that blasted Ladybug Larva sooner rather than later.

He pushed himself off the ground and prepared to follow the ant, when a strange smell hit his antennae. If it had been his last life, Adon would’ve thought it was the odor of ripe bananas. But he was fairly certain there were none of those around.

And he had an immediate idea of what the smell was.

Ants communicate with each other by leaving scent trails. This smell was barely strong enough for Adon to pick up, and it was already fading to his senses. But that was alright for ants, wasn’t it? They had sharper senses of smell than other bugs, from what he remembered.

Adon could guess what the smell was intended to mean.

Ripe fruit means fresh food. Come and get it.

He looked after the ant as it went. Should I go and snap its head off? It’s trying to get its fellow ants to come and kill the wounded animal. The thought that this creature wanted to eat him made Adon faintly indignant. But he knew it was the natural way of things, and the emotion faded.

He tried to be rational. The ant hadn’t been that big. Not a major threat by itself. Maybe he should follow it home. Help himself to a whole lot of ants.

Adon shook his head at the idea almost immediately. Ant hills were full of hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands or millions of ants, depending on how long the colony had been there. Sometimes, he remembered, super colonies would get into the billions. That sounded like a quick ticket to see the Goddess again.

So, should he just run away? Or kill the lone ant that found him? The ant was already almost out of range of his feeble eyes. Adon had been watching it as he considered his options, and the silly little thing wasn’t even looking back at him to make sure he stayed put.

It was employing a simple system for sourcing food, though. Adon supposed it must work most of the time, though for him, it would be easy enough to just walk away and get far enough from the scent trail to lose the ants. But should he bother? He could defeat a handful of ants and eat them himself. Right?

As he had that thought, his stomach growled again. That decided it. This time, he would be the predator.

Depending on how many ants showed up in response to the little one’s scent, Adon might just get a full meal to come to him.

And it couldn’t come too soon. He was getting very hungry.

His stomach rumbled again, and this time it wasn’t just a sound. He felt his body shrivel slightly, as if it was trying to take up less space and use less energy. He checked his Status menu, and it confirmed his fears. His Biomass had fallen quickly, from 5/15 to 3/15. Only three more points, and his Health would begin to suffer. This meal might be a matter of life and death.

He would stand his ground and fight, but he decided to make one concession to caution.

He walked away from the place where he’d been when the ant found him, in the opposite direction the ant had walked in. The stem Adon had fallen from was his landmark. He walked just far enough that he could still see the patch of ground where the scout had sprayed its scent. This way, if too many ants showed up, he wouldn’t be right in the middle of the scent trail. He could still escape.

After scoping out the space around his new spot, which seemed empty enough for the moment, Adon lay in wait.

He lay and ignored the faint pain in his side. He lay and rested his body, which was slightly weary from hunger. He lay and laser-focused on the single spot where he expected his prey to appear. His vision seemed to actually tunnel in on that little area.

An indeterminate time passed. Not very long. Just enough time for Adon’s stomach to growl twice more.

Then a single ant strolled toward the site, head pointed at the ground, clearly following the scent trail.

This wasn’t quite what Adon had planned, and he took a moment to decide what to do. He still had a little time before the lone ant would reach its destination. Perhaps a minute.

He had hoped a small group of ants would arrive together and that he could kill them all in a short battle. If it was only one ant instead, what should he do? He had been patient and let the one ant escape before.

But what if this one could do something to stop more ants from coming? Erasing the scent trail didn’t seem possible in Adon’s mind, but it could lay out a new trail to keep other ants from wasting their time.

No food here after all, it would say.

On the other hand, if Adon killed it, he was pretty sure ants had scents for ‘danger’ and ‘distress’ that might be deployed.

Then again, a distress signal would draw more ants, just like a food signal.

And Adon’s stomach rumbled gently again. A plaintive sound. Please feed me.

He decided to be bold. He would hunt this creature. He needed to feed again. He couldn’t afford to gamble on his next meal.

He crept around to the side, planning to circle and approach the ant from a direction it wouldn’t be able to easily see.

As the ant drew nearer to the end of the trail, Adon moved more quickly, so he could get behind it.

As Adon got closer to where the ant was, he got a better sense of its approximate size relative to its predecessor. Still comparable to a dog, but if anything, this was a smaller dog.

That other ant really did him a disservice, Adon thought, leading him to believe there was just some harmless food here rather than a vicious predator.

Adon finally circled all the way around to the back of the ant just as it reached the end of the line. The ant’s head remained pointed at the ground, its compound eyes both pointed forward and to the sides.

Adon stood in the ant’s blind spot. It was an opportunity that would last mere seconds, he knew.

You have to attack, he told himself. Don’t be afraid. You’re the predator here. The ant is just a tasty morsel of nutrition. Probably way yummier than a leaf!

As Adon was psyching himself up, the ant seemed to develop some preternatural sense that something was wrong. It started to turn its head—and Adon lunged forward from behind it!