Having just leveled up and earned 2 new skill points to spend, I took a moment to study my character sheet.

Class: Baby Dragon Level: 4 Progress toward next level: 91% HP: 15/24 SP: 8/12 Satiety: 50% Strength: 8 Dexterity: 6  Constitution: 5 Perception: 6 Will: 4 Charisma: 3 Claws: level 1 Scales: level 1 Mouth: level 4 Wings: level 0 Traits: Carnivore, Kin sensitive, Carrion feeder Abilities: Sprinting, Noxious Breath Unlearned abilities: Hot Breath, Cold Breath 2 unspent skill points available

If my stats were to be believed, I now had greater “strength” than I did before. I wasn’t sure if I felt physically stronger, but I supposed that, in a certain way, I did feel stronger, but that was mostly due to the fact that I now simply felt more comfortable in my own body and had a greater familiarity with just how hard I could push myself. Similarly, my “perception” had increased — it was true that I had gotten better at noticing things over the past few days, but that probably would have held true even in a hypothetical world where I never leveled up and remained a level 1 baby dragon with static stats: the fact that I was noticing more things probably had much more to do with my experiences (in the intangible sense) than actual “experience points.”

Of the stat increases I received from leveling up, the max stamina felt the most tangible. Having started my life with a 10 SP cap, and now having worked myself up to a 12 SP cap, I could now effectively use 20% more breath attacks each day, or do 20% more sprinting each day, or...well, anything else I found that drained my stamina meter. Even increased HP, which theoretically should have increased the buffer between life and death, didn’t seem like such a big deal. The “max HP” amount, I realized, was only loosely correlated with what was actually available to me: in practical terms, my practical HP limit was set at 80% of my theoretical max HP, and that would likely remain true for as long as the only method of HP restoration available to me was sleeping outside. In fact, for my purposes, the difference between 22 and 23 HP had been mostly cosmetic: when you took 80% and rounded the nearest integer, the result was 18 in both cases.

By far the most impactful part of leveling up had been my skill points: it was the difference between having a [noxious breath] and not having it. Not only had [noxious breath] been vital as a defensive tool against hyenas, but it was also an invaluable hunting tool, whether I had been dealing with the giant tortoise or the armored ants. Without noxious breath, I probably would have starved to death before discovering that I could ambush rabbits at night.

The first time I invested in my “mouth,” I had unlocked the ability to learn 3 new breath attacks. Knowing just how impactful having one additional skill had been, I was tempted to invest in my other abilities — claws and scales. (Obviously, the ability to deposit points into my “wings” stat would be most appealing of all, but a quick check of my stat sheet confirmed that was still impossible.) However, I had foregone an investment in claws for a reason — regardless of how deadly my claws were, my forearms still seemed rather stubby. Even if I did gain the ability that gave me “poison claws” or something like that, my breath attack seemed far more useful and versatile as both an offensive and defensive tool. It was hard for me to imagine a “claw” ability that would be a paradigm shift in the same way that my area-of-effect breath attack was, and while that might have been a failure of imagination on my part, claws seemed like the most likely candidate for a “dump” stat.

The potential usefulness of my scales seemed far more immediate: I knew what it felt like to be bitten by a hyena, and I could imagine lots of ways that scales could help with that, whether it was hardened scales that were harder to penetrate, sharp or abrasive scales that would punish and deter an attack, or even some kind of poison coating like those poison dart frogs. That said...I seemed to be doing a fine job of avoiding hyenas as it was. Admittedly, I’d had multiple run-ins with them, but it always seemed to be in those inopportune moments when I let my guard down, and for as long as skill points remained a limited resource, it seemed best to use them to increase my offensive capabilities, since all the defensive coating in the world wouldn’t matter if I somehow starved to death. (While the hyenas appeared often, they were nowhere near as omnipresent as the looming threat of hunger.)

In a moment of hopeful whimsy, I considered the "Wing level: 0" on my character sheet, and again tried to deposit a skill point. As expected, I was confronted with the same message I'd received the first time I'd tried days before:

[Unable to increase level for "Wings." Maximum level for your class reached.]

Such was the fate of a baby dragon: apparently wings would only be available once I graduated from infancy. It wasn't clear to me whether ascending from my current class of "baby dragon" to something more capable of flight would be a matter of leveling up or simply aging, but whatever the case, it seemed there was no point in trying further unless I found a way to change class.

Having accepted my fate as a wingless baby dragon for the time being, the question turned to how to best apply my skill points to increase my offensive capabilities. Anything that augmented my hunting ability would probably pay off in the long term. Bearing in mind just how effective my [noxious breath] attack had been when unleashed against the ant colony, I decided to deposit another point into [mouth] level.

[Mouth level increased: Level 5! New mouth abilities available]

[Level 5 mouth abilities:]

Poison breath (unlearned)

Sweltering breath (prerequisite: Hot breath)

Chilling breath (prerequisite: Cold breath)

[1 unspent skill point remaining]

I blinked, feeling a vague sense of deja vu. As far as I could tell, these “poison,” “sweltering,” and “chilling” breath attacks were “upgraded” versions of the “noxious,” “hot,” and “cold” breath attacks I had unlocked at level 2. At the time, I had elected to forego both the “hot” and “cold” breath attacks, which was probably why the “Sweltering breath” and “chilling breath” options were now grayed out in the same way as my “level 0 wings”: not eligible for investment just yet, though there was nothing preventing me from investing skill points to master the prerequisite abilities. Well, nothing apart from the fact that I only had one remaining skill point, and presumably mastering both “hot” and “sweltering” breath would require multiple skill points.

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Even if I did have two skill points to invest into hot or cold breath attacks, the new options weren’t particularly enticing: fire-breathing was a skill that I was interested in, but apparently a skill along the lines of “flame breath” or “fire breath” was not on offer here: [sweltering breath] was presumably hot, but it seemed to fall shy of the combustion point actually needed for fire. [Chilling breath] seemed similarly limited: “chilling” was not “freezing,” and just based on the skill name, it seemed unlikely to be the kind of skill that would magically encase enemies in blocks of ice.

It was, I supposed, reasonable enough that fire and ice breath attacks were still out of my reach: I was a baby dragon, and this was my fourth day of being one.

On a surface level, it seemed as though these “upgraded” skills represented a difference in degree, not in kind, and the [poison breath] didn’t seem too different in that respect. But there were occasions when sometimes a difference in degree was a degree in kind. (The difference between 99 and 101 degrees celcius was certainly a difference of literal degrees, but it was also the difference between liquid water and steam.) Besides, even if [poison breath] was only an incremental improvement over [noxious breath], that was no reason to skip it: given that I had already invested a large number of points into [mouth] points with the intent of making my [noxious breath] incrementally more effective, spending one more skill point to master [poison breath] seemed like a no-brainer. I wasn’t quite sure what exactly would separate “poison” breath from “noxious” breath, but that uncertainty wasn’t enough to give me any hesitation. Spending the skill point was an easy decision to make.

[Skill acquired: Poison breath. Emits poison gas, which may inflict poison status scaling with mouth level. Poison deals damage over time. Cost: 2 SP]

I blinked again. At first blush, this seemed nearly identical to my [noxious breath] which, per its description, [Emits noxious gas, which deals damage over time. Scales with mouth level.] However, after taking the time to scrutinize the skills’ descriptions, I noticed a subtle yet important difference: my [noxious breath], as best I could tell, only did damage to creatures that were actively breathing it, or at least surrounded by it, in the case of the ants. Once the gas cloud dissipated, or the target stepped out of the gas cloud, the damage-over-time effect presumably went away as well. [Poison breath], by contrast, seemed to inflict “poison status,” which did damage over time — but it seemed entirely possible that the poison status could linger even after the initial breath attack was over. That seemed like a significant offensive advantage, if it meant that I could poison prey and then follow them at my own leisure until they died from damage-over-time.

However, there was one word in the skill description which gave me pause — this ability ”may inflict poison status.” I was never a big fan of “maybes,” and an ostensibly [poison gas] that might fail at the basic task of poisoning a foe was hardly an attractive proposition. Even a “high” success rate of 80% or higher wasn’t the kind of thing that I wanted to bet my life on, and I had already been involved in numerous situations where the effectiveness of my [noxious breath] had literally been the difference between life and death. Any skill that was unreliable enough to warrant a “maybe” in its description was probably too risky to use on defense. That said, if it could improve the SP-efficiency of my hunting in situations where my life wasn’t in peril, it could potentially be useful.

The ability reportedly scaled with mouth level, but it wasn’t entirely clear to me what that meant — did higher mouth levels mean a greater success rate when trying to poison foes, or did it mean more lethal poison? That was something that would have to be tested by experiment, but gathering experimental data would be expensive, considering that 2 SP represented 17% of my daily SP budget.

Still, with [8/12 SP] remaining for the day, it was probably worth doing at least one test of my new [poison breath] ability. I was aware of the dangers of extrapolating too much from a single data point, but given that I was currently trying to extrapolate quite a lot from zero observational data, doing a trial with an N of 1 would at least be an improvement.

I located an ant (I didn’t have to search far to find it), and in a repeat of the move I had executed several times during my brief life, I snuck up and leapt onto it, pinning it beneath me. I let my [poison breath] billow forth. It seemed to be a slightly brighter shade of green than my [noxious breath], somehow looking more unnatural. The odor was similar to the sweet, sickly aroma of my [noxious breath], but slightly sweeter in a way that somehow made it feel more unsettlingly unnatural, less like the stink of something rotten than the pungent smell of something chemical.

The ant squirmed under me, and I felt a pinch on my underside from what must have been its mandibles. Along with the pinch (and a visible reaction from my health bar), I got a notification.

[You are Impaired - Weakened perception and dexterity]

It wasn’t the first time I’d been bitten by an ant trapped under my belly, and it was a reminder that even battling the weakest of prey wasn’t an entirely risk-free endeavor, though the pain of the bite was a far greater deterrence than the prospect of actually being dangerously wounded by an ant. Even if this ant was drastically bigger (and more well-armored) than the ones I was used to back on earth, I somehow doubted that there were many worlds (magical or otherwise) that had been designed such that an ant could actually pose a real threat to a dragon. It was nice to know that, even in my infancy, there were still some creatures that I simply outclassed.

For perhaps ten seconds, the ant seemed to have no reaction to my [poison breath] attack — and then it did. I felt it moving frantically underneath me, wildly flailing, poking, biting, doing anything it could to escape, reacting in exactly the same way that previous ants had reacted to my [noxious breath]. This, I guessed, was when the “damage over time” effect of the poison was taking hold. I wasn’t sure whether the (approximately) ten second delay was due to the ant taking awhile to register its new condition, or (I feared) a case of it needing to spend that long enveloped in the breath attack. It could also be that the ant didn’t need to be enveloped in the poison cloud for that long, but rather that this was the role of “chance” at play — if my breath attack only had the mere possibility of poisoning an enemy, then it stood to reason that the longer the creature was trapped in the poison cloud, the more chances it had to be poisoned, little different from a smoker elevating their cancer risk with every puff (albeit on a more accelerated timescale).

Whatever the case, the ant eventually stopped moving.

[Armored ant defeated! Earned 7% experience toward next level.]

I devoured the ant and was barely done swallowing before my eyes began scanning the horizon for another ant. Partly, I was eager to gather another data point to test my hypothesis — was my [poison breath] always so slow to kill, or was it simply a case of longer durations increasing the probability of inflicting poison status on the target?

However, there was another thing motivating my hunt for another ant: I currently had 98% of the exp needed to reach level 5, and having already leveled up once today, I was eager to do it again.

Class: Baby Dragon Level: 4 Progress toward next level: 98% HP: 14/24 SP: 6/12 Satiety: 51% Claws: level 1 Scales: level 1 Mouth: level 5 Wings: level 0 Traits: Carnivore, Kin sensitive, Carrion feeder Abilities: Sprinting, Noxious Breath, Poison Breath