I awoke slowly. Painstakingly. My sluggish eyes adjusted to the light easily, but less so came adjustment to the chill. I felt my back, sides, limbs press to a surface as cold and hard as winter stone, front grinding against itself in a serpentine-

I stopped. My memory shot back just a bit farther. The Skills of my other Contestants, the massive glowing figure, the ritual to shed my humanity- And judging by Mathias's spitting epithet, it worked.

My entire form began to fill, with joy. With hope. With confidence. The motions expressed themselves in what would have been a fist pump, limb slamming against the cold stone near my back with a satisfying crack. I was going to overcome all the challenges before me and I knew it. I twisted around to the crack, seeing rock and coral through the tiny hole. The beauty of it gobsmacked me, enough to give me a few seconds of pause

And in those few seconds, water gushed in. My satisfaction quenched at the impending drown, as if I was made of living fire rather than meat. I felt desperation, uncoiling myself to escape this stone shell. A larger crack formed, center straining as I uncoiled to my full length in a moment of majesty.

Water crashed in around me. In a moment of panic, I tried to suck in air, tried to buy myself some more time, but it was already too late. Water slid right down my throat like acid, causing me to curl, cough, and sputter. My eyes narrowed from discomfort, heart accelerating with fear.

When from my sides, pressure equalized. I felt the same water pushed out slits near my neck, sighing in relief. Of course I could breathe under water if my egg hatched there!

I closed my eyes and focused. My lungs were running on empty. My desire to breathe flared, unfamiliar muscles flexed, and my new gills bubbled with activity

My eyes widened. I was free, and the golden god was not going to deprive me of that. However, I was a biological creature, bound by the same rules as any other. I scanned my environment for feline priorities. threats to avoid, prey to eat, and small holes to avoid the first and catch the second. My eyes, free from any inefficiencies they had in life, took in this waterfall of information. I was in a nest, a hatchery, a nursery of some sort, almost twenty other eggs of jagged grey strewn about the skyblue sand. Several others had the same idea as I, siblings letting me get a good look at what I could be.

Each one was long and thin, clearly some form of sea snake. All of them bore horns on their head unlike any snake I knew of, two massive back-mounted fins apiece in clear pastiche of wings, and side-pointing translucent growths on their tails. Even more bafflingly, all of them were coloured every hue of the rainbow, plus one black and one white. Their, no, our underbellies were darker and duller in colour but clearly not suited to camouflage.

"Are we poisonous?" I thought, lacking the mouth muscles to speak. I had no other explanation for the bright, varied colour schemes, dedicating that slice of brainpower back to watching and learning. My eight hatchling siblings thrashed, flexed, and undulated; their little brains working overtime to figure out these new pieces of equipment, when I noticed another variance.

Red looked more like a ruby with more defined scales, orange and yellow sported a longer, wider set of gills, green and green alone had fangs that poked from their mouth rather than rested in it, blue purple and white had larger and frankly prettier tailgrowths, and the black one finished off the list with larger and sharper-looking horns.

Not knowing if it was an early sign of sexual dimorphism on display or something more bizarre. I curled my own tail backwards, seeing a pleasant shade of pink scales surrounding a cyan underbelly.

Giggling at what the colours meant, I swished my tail up and down. Aquatic movement was... fickle at the best of times, and I nearly bumped my head into the coral on the ceiling before an epiphany hit. I stretched my back-mounted fins, my aquatic wings, and smoothly flexed my tail up and down. Water slid past the hydrodynamic membranes, muscles in them flexing to stay open against the heavier-than-air tide.

While I was flying, my siblings were practicing. Red and green were playfighting, seeming to train lining up for a takedown. One's enlarged fangs matched the other's scale armor, offense and defense boosted in equal measure. And while the others were getting their own handle on swimming, the black one with impressive horns posed in the center of the hatchery and made a small but respectable roar.

Heads turned. Mine snapped right to their attention, and before I could decide we galumphed as one through the cavemouth and into the open ocean ahead. I could practically hear our collective stomachs growl, desire for food stronger pushing us to hunt as a school of nine. It seemed to outweigh a dragon's desire for individuality- unless of course that desire simply took longer to kick in.

The area outside looked impossibly large, making me feel even smaller. The surface looked passably close, only a few meters up, but what caused my stomach to drop was the view down. very quickly the shelf I floated over gave way to inky depths, rocky spires jutting upwards like elephant hairs. Aquatic beings of all shapes and sizes swam, diversity of tactics likely even more vibrant than diversity of form.

In my half-minute of still observation, my school of siblings had swam ahead. I kicked my wings and tail into high gear, pangs of hunger reverberating with every rapid tailstroke and forceful adjustment of my backfins. My squad was still ahead, trailing a large, fat-looking fish as it swam in a lazy circle between the shallows and over the depths. The red one got it's rear in gear, living up to the stereotype and popping right up infront of the fat fish. It opened it's jaw impossibly wide to bite, wide enough to fit around my sibling and have enough room to spare. Oddly dull, curved, rodentlike teeth bristled, ready to close down on red scales with a sickening-

I was expecting a crunch. Instead, all I received was a scrape, and a roar from my dark-hued leader sibling. While the red one played distraction, the large-tailed trio and miss-or-mister fangs latched onto the fish's side, while the gilled duo swam ahead, brightly-coloured forms dancing in hypnotic patterns and drawing the fat fish's attention. It swam towards the blindingly obvious trap. The hangers-on shook, spilling blood into the water that only invigorated the wrecking crew. I felt a spur forward, wings getting a workout as they held steady against the beating of my tail. I retracted one, turning to meet the fish's trajectory, and opened my mouth for a charging bite.

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My lower row of teeth, smaller but more stable, gouged at the monster's eye. While the sharps couldn't find their way past, the damage was already done. Our opponent was down a fin, sporting several new openings along it's side, and uselessly scraping against my red-armored sibling while they painted the inside of it's mouth red. Unusually human disgust rose up, before quelled by a wisp of fishblood. Within seconds, My behavior was indistinguishable from my more instinctual kin. Within a minute, the fish ceased to move. And within only a few minutes more, we picked it clean. The nine of us lay on the sand, basking in the rays of the shallows after our display of efficiency and brutality like the cutest type of special forces imaginable.

The sun moved across the sky, and we started to move again. The black one lead the way with a subtle roar, seeming to march us into line for easy organization. We returned to the safety of our cave with little fanfare, spreading out to rest and play. And while it might have been my imagination, I noticed some of the eggs looked larger than before. Closer to joining us in the realm of the awake.

I might not have been the leader-sibling with majestic horns or a roar to match, but I could at least be proactive damn it.

While my siblings swam about in search of enrichment, I swam out. Air cycled through my gills, renewed energy cresting me over the lip of our coral home cave with ease. I pulled in my wings and let myself sink to the shelf, surveying my small hunting ground. Another fat fish passed overhead without a care in the world, thick fins propelling it intermittently. I lacked the toughness to take in a fair fight or the precision to defeat in an unfair one, so observed it descend too close for comfort and root around in the shelf. It's jaws opened wide, closing a second later to crunch around something small and burrowing. It spat out a burst of sand and swam away, gulping loudly as it went.

It all made sense. Those teeth weren't just for biting, they were for digging. And while I lacked teeth to dig, I had a tail.

I sucked in water through my gills, spitting it out my mouth, and jabbed my tail under. With a flap of my wings, I catapulted a quickly-dispersing clump of sand upwards, uprooting a crab at least the width of my body. It struggled and snapped, blocking any potential lunge with a layer of apprehension. I did not want my snout, or worse, my eye on the business end of it's claws. I had to have more weapons than that...

My wings were strong, but likely easy to snip. My attention however turned to my tail, plan formed before the crab fell. I whipped it around like a drunken haymaker, crab's claw moving to intercept but snapping nothing but water as my spinning strike went wide. I pumped my wings, lining my twisting form up again, and struck true. My tail-crystals cracked crab armor, brilliant blue burst of encouragement all I needed to swing again. The crab's claw couldn't block in time, as my built-in blade pierced the crab's vitals.

A voice, cold and calculating resounded through my head and snapped me back to reality.

[You have slain: Tunnel bit. Expirience gained.]

I was so lost in being a social aquatic predator that I forgot I was an otherworldly contestant. If I didn't level up as fast as draconically possible, I was going to be toast. Either I was included last-minute, and someone else winning would mean humiliaion, torture, or nonexistance at the hand of the gold bastard, or I was simply part of the world and most likely mean one of them death, enslavement, or processing into crafting material by the hand of one of those absurdly powerful 'Contestants.' While the possibilities were hard to tell apart, they had the same solution.

I, Valerie Flying Drake, was going to become or overcome the heir of the world!

By... killing a lot of crabs. Everyone has to start somewhere.

I swam to another spot on the shelf and stabbed downwards, wings letting me act like a shovel. A terrible piercing feeling shot through the base of my tail before I could draw it back out. I panicked, hearing one of my thin scales crack, and sweeping my wings down. I flipped forward, almost crying out at the scraping feeling of the crab's claw on my tail, before feeling a sudden release of pressure. Taking a second to reorient myself, my gaze fell on the crab seconds later, as it fell back to the ground. At least, the right 90% of it did. The crab was down a claw and painting the sea blue. Shaking away my pain I wasted no time and delivered it another spinning strike, tailblade striking it's entire unguarded side.

[You have slain: Tunnel bit. Expirience gained.]

While definitely more painful, this kill was faster than the last. I took it's confirmed-dead form in my mouth and dropped it over the lip of the cave like a mailed letter, barely stopping to do anything more before another delve. Gears turned in my head. I sought a away to reveal crabs without getting stabs. And thinking back to the fat fish's digging, I concocted a plan.

I swam low to the ground, narrowing my eyes, and swam forward as choppily as possible. Sand kicked up under the flap of my wings, disrupting a dozen nest crabs in their sandy shelters. I wasted no time, side-flipping to get one right between the eight legs. It snapped wide, then snapped out of existence with another bit of praise from the System.

Only suprred further on, I chased after one that was trying to tunnel away, wings taking me as close as I need for a bite. My teeth closed around the back of it's shell, out of claw range, to crick-crack-crunch away at the crab. I raised it high in victory, and a different System message played.

[You have slain: Tunnel bit. Expirience threshold has been reached] The cold voice congradulated.

[Phyllopteryx Hatchling]- So that's what I was? This world must have had odd species names

[Has completed its advancement from level 1 to level 2] My eyes brightened in happiness. Possibly artifically so, but who was I to question it?

[Skill point gained]

I could tell this was a real boost in power. I gathered up the two more meal-crabs and dropped them in my small pile near the enterance for hatchlings, met with looks of confusion, worry, and awe as I swam back in, curled up in the very center of the nest, and willed my [Character Sheet] into existence.