I get

Royal Road

SomethingOtherThanRain

Re: Dragonize (LitRPG) by Kuiper

Chapter 16: Predator Awakened

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I slowly backed away from the entrance to the spider's lair. I wasn't moving slowly out of caution, since it struck me as unlikely that a giant spider would unexpectedly spring at me from the hole now that I had escaped -- though I didn't rule out the possibility. Rather, my slow and deliberate movement was intended to keep the entrance in my field of view so that I could observe it from several angles, allowing me to fully take stock of its position. The spider cave entrance wasn't obvious -- I would have missed its presence entirely if it hadn't been for the smell of rotting flesh wafting out of it -- but it seemed like an important point of interest that I definitely didn't want to lose track of, so I made note of several nearby landmarks, including a particularly tall and jagged outcropping of rock, and a place where the smoother rocks ran against the craggy ground. Based on those, I ought to be able to triangulate the position of the cave if I ever needed to seek it out -- or intentionally avoid it.

I looked back at what remained of the rabbit, now nothing more than a pelt still mottled with cobwebs. Had the rotting rabbit been a trap to attempting to ensnare a large carnivore like me? It was certainly possible: spiders were ambush predators, and using food as a form of bait was a basic ambush technique. Then again, it seemed far more likely that the web was there simply to catch creatures like rabbits, and that ensnaring one, the spider had already achieved its goal. Still, if that were the case, it left the question of why the rabbit had been sitting in the web so long that it had started to rot, instead of immediately being devoured. After all, the smell of rotting flesh seemed more likely to repel other prey (like, say, other rabbits) than it was to attract a carrion-feeder like me. Was the spider saving it as a meal for later? Or maybe the spider simply wasn't around? Perhaps the spider had already abandoned this den, leaving behind old cobwebs that had managed to ensnare some poor unfortunate rabbit. In my brief foray into the cave, I hadn't encountered the spider, which meant that either the spider had left...or that it was lurking deeper within the cave. Maybe the spider had an entire network of tunnels underground, and that cave entrance (and the rabbit that had wandered into it) were just one of many possible food sources, just one more meal for a spider that might have more meat than it knew what to do with.

If the spider had a surplus of meat, that was certainly the sort of thing that ought to draw my attention: it was in the nature of carrion-feeders to scavenge kills that other (potentially larger and more deadly) predators had already managed to slay. Still, I wasn't eager to try going toe-to-toe -- or claw-to-claw -- with a giant spider, which seemed like a likely outcome if I encroached too much on its territory. I didn't much care for the feeling of web clinging to my tail, and I counted myself lucky to have avoided an encounter with the arachnid that had spun the web.

Aside from my unsettling discovery that this valley was home to at least one spider, probably of the giant variety, today had been a good day so far, as far as food was concerned. The rabbit carcass that I had snatched from the spider's cave, such as it was, wasn't as hearty a meal as the hyena I'd had for breakfast, but I was still sitting comfortably at [61% satiety].

Since my metabolism seemed to burn through around 50% of my hunger meter each day, I had over a full day's worth of calories in my stomach, and judging from the position of the sun, it was still morning. Of course, while carrion was good for calories, it didn't provide exp. That, I decided, should be my next priority: increasing my level would increase the range (and depth) of my abilities, which likely meant directly increasing my chances of survival.

The tortoise I had defeated previously had given me a huge chunk of exp when I defeated it, but I was less than gung-ho at the idea of killing a tortoise just for the exp: it was a basic principle of ecological selection that animals' size and lifespan tended to inversely correlate with how frequently they produced new offspring. On one end of the spectrum, there were tiny creatures like insects that reproduced relentlessly and had an expected lifespan measured in days or weeks. Even smaller mammals like rabbits had a reputation for breeding like, well, rabbits, and most wild rabbits didn't live for more than a couple years. On the opposite end of the spectrum were giant creatures like whales, rhinos, and elephants, the kinds of creatures that lived for decades in their natural habitat, and that were at the highest risk of being hunted to extinction because of how infrequently they reproduced.

Of course, I had to eat to survive, and my sense of self-preservation was probably a higher priority at this point than any sense of ecological ethics. Nonetheless, even if I was thinking about this from a selfish perspective, hunting any species to extinction represented an opportunity cost: any tortoise that I killed today would be a tortoise I couldn't kill tomorrow, and thus, tortoise-hunting was a project probably best saved for a time when I could fully take advantage of the resources it offered by cracking open its shell and devouring its insides. I was still working on that technology, and I certainly planned to fully harness all of the plateau's rocks (or as I liked to think of them, my reserves of gravitational potential energy), but right now I just needed a smidge more exp to put me over the threshold to the next level, and my desire to hit level 4 ASAP was taking priority.

Hunting ants wasn't as hedonically rewarding as ambitiously seeking out sources of meat, but it was a reliable source of exp, barely a threat to my physical safety, and good for a few calories to boot, so a new ant hunt seemed like a good course of action. I was already 96% of the way to level 4, a single ant kill would be enough to put me over the edge.

Without too much searching, I found an ant. Just as I was about to pounce, I noticed that something was clutched in its mandibles, probably a bit of food it was carrying back to its nest. Nice. The only thing better than killing and eating an ant was killing it, eating it, and stealing its lunch. Well, maybe not its lunch. Maybe it was bringing that food back to the colony to feed to some other juvenile ants. Heck, maybe the colony was full of non-armored ants that sent these ants out for food runs.

That thought made me pause. Yesterday, I had followed an ant that was on the prowl away from its colony, hoping it would lead me to some bountiful kill. But what if this ant could do me a much greater favor by leading me back to where it lived? Maybe the only thing better than killing an ant, eating it, and stealing its lunch, was going to its home and killing a bunch of its brethren. If ants in this world reproduced with the same rapidity as the ants I was familiar with back on earth, I could hunt ants as much as I wanted without any risk of hunting them to extinction.

I followed the ant, growing more excited at the idea. One of the biggest weaknesses of my [noxious breath] was the fact that it dissipated so quickly after use. But ants lived in underground colonies. What kind of ventilation did they have down there? Maybe I could kill two birds with one stone -- or multiple ants with one SP.

The ant led me back to the area with the craggy ground. Apparently, the ground that was porous enough to provide comfortable burrows to rabbits and spiders was also home to ants. As the ant ambled ahead of me across uneven ground, I struggled to keep up. The ant seemed to travel along so effortlessly, regardless of the shape of the ground. While the craggy ground wasn't difficult, per se, it was definitely slower traveling for me than if I had just been walking along flat ground. Ironically, the ant's indifference to the shape of the ground it was on was what allowed me to keep up with it: there were several times when it encountered large rocks and climbed vertically to scale them, rather than simply walking around the rock to get to where it was going, and those pathfinding inefficiencies helped ensure there was never too much distance between me and the ant.

As I followed, the ant traipsed over terrain that was increasingly porous, which made it more and more challenging to follow, as it grew harder to make out the shape of the ant from the shape and texture of the ground. Earlier, when tracking the scent of the rotting rabbit to the spider's cave, the cave's entrance was so inconspicuous that I could have mistaken it for an overhanging rock with nothing but shadow underneath. Now, the ground I was traveling over was full of dents and divots, its craggy texture creating dozens upon dozens of overlapping shadows, any of which could have been large enough for a creature like the ant to slip through. Would this ant manage to somehow slip away without me noticing?

After a minute of doing my best to follow the ant, my worries about whether the ant would manage to give me the slip were made manifest: it disappeared from sight. Clearly, it had slipped away somewhere, but there was no single obvious hole that it had slipped into, with the ground full of crevasses, any of which might actually be the entrance to a longer tunnel. Of course, that didn't mean it was time for me to give up the hunt. Quite the contrary: this is where the hunt for the ant's colony began.

I scanned the area in a small radius around where I had seen the ant disappear, and tried to look for anything that could be a tell as to where the ant had slipped away. I didn't see any telltale visual indicators. I was half expecting to see sand, just because that seemed to be where ants naturally burrowed, but this wasn't sandy ground, and these ants' burrowing patterns were probably different from the kind of ants that I was used to: when you were as big as these "armored ants," moving around matter proportional to your own size was more difficult. There was a reason that some ants back on earth were famous for being able to lift over 1000 times their own body weight, while an elephant might carry less than its own body weight: there was no getting around the square-cube law. The bigger the animal, the greater the ratio of its mass to the cross section of its limbs, which meant that there were costs to being big (and perks to being small). Bigger ants might be fiercer to contend with, but they were probably less capable as tunnel-builders, considering that digging bigger tunnels required moving a greater mass of dirt, and their size afforded them proportionally less strength to deal with all that mass they had to move. The point about ants' ability to tunnel through dirt was hardly relevant, considering that the ground here was hard and rocky, not soft or sandy in the least.

So, if I wasn't looking for sand, what could I look for?

I ended up inspecting every single hole and crevasse in the area, not that it did much good: I couldn't see very far into those holes, considering that they were literally where the sun didn't shine, and they were way too small for me to enter and follow after the ant. But, as I placed my face directly in front of one of the holes in an attempt to see what was inside, I remembered another of my senses: smell.

There was an odor that seemed to be emanating from one of the holes, which I immediately recognized as belonging to the ant. Or, at least, it was similar to odors that I had smelled several times over the past few days during my interactions with ants without really consciously registering it. That made sense: smell was how many ant species back on earth communicated. Besides that, there was the obvious fact that ants were bundles of chemicals and chemical reactions, just like any other creature with a functioning metabolism, which is apparently why squashed ants emitted a smell that other ants could sense. It stood to reason that some of those would be chemicals I was capable of smelling.

Having just discovered the smell of what I presumed to be the ants' lair, I sniffed several of the adjacent holes, just to make sure I had gotten the right one. If this was where the ants were hanging out, then maybe it was time to let 'er rip. Only one way to find out. I lined up my mouth with the entrance of the cave and exhaled [noxious breath].

I waited with bated breath to see what would happen. Well, okay, my breath wasn't literally bated: quite the opposite. I slowly exhaled into the hole even after spitting the noxious fumes, in hopes that blowing into the hole would create a pressure that would force my [noxious breath] deeper into the hole. After that, I waited for the better part of a minute. I was just about to up and leave to consider my next course of action when I saw a notification.

[Armored ant defeated! Level up!]

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

I sat awed as duplicate notifications flashed across my field of vision faster than I could read them. There must have been at least a dozen of them that flashed by, rapidly at first, then slowing down to a trickle before finally petering out...

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

After several seconds passed without a new notification rolling in, I noted that I was now level 4 (with 2 fresh unspent skillpoints to spend), and already 91% of the way to level 5. I opened my juvenile dragon jaw and squawked in delight before hunkering down to unleash another [noxious breath] attack, reasoning that when you hit a jackpot success like this, you don't abandon the pursuit. Now was the time to double down. I let my second [noxious breath] attack spill fourth. I had stamina to spare, and now seemed like a good a time as any to experiment.

I waited, in hopes that the first volley of notifications would be followed by a second volley. Unfortunately, it didn't come. Dang. Maybe I should have chosen to double down sooner. By the time I unleashed the second [noxious breath], the ants had probably all scuttled out of range, with any that were caught or stuck near the entrance already dead to my first attack. Still, it was hard to feel regret at a moment like this: this was a big discovery.

Getting that massive quantity of exp for a single point of stamina made that single first use of noxious breath one of the most SP-efficient moves of my short career as a baby dragon. I was only four days old, but I was starting to get the hang of this, and if my physical maturity as a dragon was tied to leveling up, having this ant colony available as a repeatable source of exp gain meant that I wouldn't remain a baby for very long. Then again, there was always the possibility that my physical maturity was entirely decoupled from my "level": would a peaceful person that never killed anything during their life die as an elderly level 1? It seemed possible. Maybe the inverse was true: perhaps I would end up entirely over-leveled before graduating beyond infancy.

Whatever the case, one thing was undeniable: leveling up meant getting stronger, and that seemed like a good thing to be. This little ant colony could prove to be the find of a lifetime. Of course, the question was how repeatable this little maneuver was. I knew, based on the number of ants I had seen forming a line to the turtle shell on a previous day, that I hadn't killed all the ants down there: had seen scores of them, and based on the fact that my little breath attack had brought me all the way from level 3 to level 5, it seemed like I had only killed 14 ants. (The first ant kill had brought me from level 3 to level 4, and the next 13 ant kills would have brought me up to my current 91% progress toward level 5.)

In fact, given how common ants were, it wouldn't surprise me if this single ant colony numbered in the hundreds, with potentially more ant colonies throughout the valley. Still, just because there were more ants I hadn't killed yet didn't mean that the same trick would work twice. Maybe the dead ants would serve as a deterrent to any other ants, discouraging them from spending time in the passageways that were vulnerable to my breath attack. Or maybe the dead ants would block those tunnels, preventing anyone else from using them until they decayed away. And there was always the possibility that the ants might learn from this, though it seemed unlikely: the hyenas seemed slow to learn, and ants struck me as even less capable of critical thought than hyenas.

If I ended up being a victim of my own success, the most likely culprit would be adaptation: maybe there were only a small percentage of ants who were susceptible to my breath attacks, possibly due to something as mundane as what part of the underground lair they preferred to spend time in. If I killed off all of those ants, the only ones left would be the ones who didn't have that susceptibility, which felt a lot like breeding [noxious breath]-resistant ants, in the same way that anti-biotics bred stronger bacteria.

But was that really something I needed to worry about on such a short timescale? Any kind of "evolutionary adaptation" seemed unlikely, given how ant reproduction worked: my understanding of ant biology was fuzzy, but if they had a queen, and all of the worker ants were female, then none of the worker ants would be passing on their genes anyway, right? Or maybe the point was moot and this was a world where ants, like dragon eggs, just spontaneously sprung into existence whenever a goddess willed it.

There seemed to be little point in speculating further. While I was tempted to believe that my scientific knowledge might lend me an advantage, the most basic principle of science was that ideas were tested by experiment, and the best way to figure out whether ants would adapt to my strategy of fumigating their underground nest would be to return tomorrow -- or later in the day -- and see how they reacted to another breath attack. In the meantime, I had other things to occupy my attention, which offered plenty of opportunity for experimentation. Back at the plateau, my experiments with dropping rocks remained incomplete. And there was also the fact that I had just leveled up, which left open the question of what to do with my newly-acquired skill points.

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

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