Welp, I’d been hit enough times by baby versions of those lightning stingers. No way in hell I was gonna let a big one hit me after seeing that monstrous vulture get nailed. I gave that crystal a beat to charge up, then threw myself sideways into the oasis water with a splash.

  Lightning zapped the air I’d just been standing in, and thunder crashed. The smell of burnt ozone dirtied the air.

  I slipped around in the wet sand for a second, water up to my knees, and looked up.

  The momma scorpion turned to face me, glaring, pincers ready. But it didn’t come at me. It didn’t need to with its own built-in RANGED ARTILLERY.

  If I stayed where I was, it was probably just gonna wait and pick me off. I could maybe duck under water when it fired. But didn’t water conduct electricity? I should have paid more attention in science class.

  The scorpion sat there. Waiting. Watching. The crystal wasn’t glowing yet, so either it needed time to recharge after two blasts like that and was canny enough to wait, or it was biding its time for a better shot, maybe studying me.

  There was nowhere to run and hide in the little oasis. If I wanted to survive, I was gonna have to attack the monster. I muttered, “This sucks.” I waded back to shore, gripped the spear in one hand, and watched the scorpion’s stinger.

  The scorpion’s whole body turned on its six legs, following and targeting me.

  I took a step forward and stopped.

  The scorpion waited.

  I took another. Then another.

  A white spark of light appeared in the stinger.

  I tensed my whole body.

  The stinger’s glow intensified. One second. Two. Three.

  I dodged, diving to the side, this time away from the water.

  The lightning bolt zapped by overhead. Thunder rattled my bones.

  Weak muscles protesting, sunburned skin aching, I hurriedly pushed myself up from the sandy grass. Legs churning as fast as I could in that state, I did the dumbest thing ever and charged the creature. Probably the slowest charge ever, and the thing was a good thirty or forty paces away. I was about a quarter of the way there when I realized it would probably charge up its next shot before I arrived in point-blank range.

  I was halfway there when the stinger lit up again, twenty paces to go.

  The stinger glowed.

  I spotted some bushes with a small boulder to my right. I feinted left, ran right, and dove behind the boulder.

  The edge of the lightning bolt caught me in the foot. Every tendon in my leg seemed to snap, like flicking a tense wire. The shock travelled up my leg and into my body. I flopped around for a few seconds, teeth clenched, helpless. The moment I got my senses back and could move, I shakily grabbed the spear and made ready to defend myself.

  But the scorpion wasn’t charging me back. Poking my head around the small boulder, I saw it still watching me. I grumbled while painfully getting to my feet, “Well, that’s just great. Aren’t you patient?”. With a deep breath, I ran forward again.

  Fifteen paces.

  The stinger lit up. I’d lost too much time on the ground after the last one.

  Ten paces.

  The stinger glowed. I tensed; I wasn’t gonna make it.

  Eight paces. Six. Time was running out. I desperately threw the spear at its face.

  The spear didn’t have enough power to penetrate, but it hit the scorpion between the eyes, just above the mouth. The creature flinched backward. The lightning bolt went over my head, making every hair I had stand up as I continued to charge. The pincers opened, and this close, they were even bigger than I’d thought.

  I had no weapon as I ran at it. I was screwed. Sure, I had taken martial arts for several years, back when I was younger, but that had been designed for human opponents. None of it had ever trained me to fight something that could snip your arms and legs off. An idea hit, and without thinking, I dropped into a baseball slide. This close to the water, there was grass, but lots of sand too, and I sprayed that sand right in the creature’s many eyes.

  The scorpion defensively crossed its arms in front of its face, probably thinking I was drop kicking it or something, but the sand didn’t seem to affect it at all.

  But I was able to get a hand on the spear again. I rose back to my feet, took one step, and leaped into the air like the hero on a movie poster. It would have been nice if I’d looked badass at that moment, like a hero, but I probably looked like a crazy homeless person about to get himself killed. Both hands on the spear, I drove it down into the scorpion’s back, while my weight drove the creature to the ground, its legs unable to support my weight.

  The scorpion’s exoskeleton was like plate armour. The spearhead only penetrated halfway. But it was enough for the scorpion to panic and flail about. Or it tried to. One of the legs cracked from my weight. Even with five, it shook back and forth. But it was the tail that got me. It struck, the crystal slamming into my forehead.

  I reeled back, falling off the scorpion and pulling the spear free.

  The creature instantly turned on me. It jabbed, almost too fast to follow, sometimes punching, sometimes snipping those pincers.

  I scrambled backward, feet slipping in the soft, sandy soil, fending off as many strikes as I could with the spear. Some got through and bruised or cut my chest and legs. The tail lashed out, and I barely dodged it by leaning left and getting the spear up.

  The scorpion used that distraction to dart forward, getting inside my defenses. It snipped at my ankle, which I barely lifted out of the way. It snipped with the other pincer and gashed my other shin. The tail came at me again, a big, overhand blow. I just got the spear up with both hands to block, but it was largely a feint. The scorpion stepped closer and delivered a massive uppercut — TO MY BALLS.

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  I hated this world. My balls hated it even more.

  Thank all that’s holy and unholy both that the pincer had been closed or it would have snipped certain precious things clean off, and I wasn’t sure I’d have the will to keep fighting or even living at that point.

  The hit hurt. My stomach felt like it was trying to climb up my throat. My legs went weak. One hand clutched my man pearls while the other feebly held the spear in front of me.

  The tail struck again. It hit me in the chest.

  I fell backward and landed with a splash in the shallows of the oasis pool. With what little strength I had at the moment, I whimpered like a baby, tears falling down my cheeks, and lamely kicked myself into deeper water.

  The scorpion didn’t give chase. They didn’t seem keen on getting wet. It also didn’t need to. It still had that long-range stinger. So it stood there, favouring the broken leg but still mobile on the other five, staring at me.

  I held up two fingers in a V sign. “Peace? I didn’t know they were your kids. I only ate them because I had no choice. And, honestly, they tasted horrible. ”

  The stinger sparkled.

  “Aw, come on!”

  I was too weak to throw myself at it. So I turned around and clawed my way underwater. The slope of the underwater sand was steep, the middle of the oasis pool about four times my height. Spear still in one hand, I dove under the surface and tried to escape. I almost made it.

  It seemed like electricity doesn’t penetrate water deeply, mostly shooting through the surface of the water. My head had gotten a couple of meters down, but my feet were still closer to the surface when the lightning bolt landed and decided it wanted to go right through me to the floor of the pool, grounded on some glittering black and gold rocks in the mud and sand.

  Every muscle snapped taut. I thought I was going to snap all my own bones and teeth. Then I blacked out, still underwater.

  Losing consciousness isn’t like in stories. You don’t pass out for more than a few seconds before you start to get brain damage. You see someone get punched out in a movie and wake up in a different building, which took an hour to get to? They’d either wake up a vegetable or not at all.

  I woke up a few seconds later. You ever see someone dynamite a lake? Fish just float to the surface, stunned. I was doing that! I found myself face down, hanging in the water, arms dangling, spear in the mud below me. My heavy, wet robe probably kept me from rising to the surface. Well, there followed lots of inhaling water, splashing, coughing, flailing around like an idiot, that sort of thing.

  I’d barely gotten any air when I saw that stinger light up again like a vengeful spotlight. I dropped and tried to get as low in the water as I could. This time, it worked. I sat on the bottom of the pool, ass in the muck while white lightning played over the surface. I felt about for the spear and noticed the water warming up overhead. I guess if electricity has nowhere to escape from water, it heats it up. That meant I couldn’t hide down here forever. Plus, there was the whole breathing thing. It was getting really important at this point.

  My fingers touched the shaft of the spear, wrapped around it, and I kicked off the bottom, straight up. My head broke the surface, and I inhaled, only to get into another coughing fit. Fought through it this time, but this time, I bee-lined directly away from the monster.

  No, I wasn’t fleeing. It was a strategic retreat. There was no escaping the thing. If I tried to leave the oasis, it would just follow me out into the sand of the desert and shoot me in the ass. But I needed a breather.

  Got to the far shore, and looked back, expecting the next lightning bolt any second.

  The scorpion sat on the other side of the water, staring. The stinger was dull. Maybe after all that shooting, it needed a breather too. I had no idea how the thing worked other than assuming ‘magic’ was the answer. But maybe even a magic beast couldn’t shoot forever. Of course, that had me second-guessing myself. Should I have attacked instead of running away? Or did the momma have another bolt or two in her and was just resting? No way to know.

  On the far shore, I kept an eye on her as I slogged out of the water, up the sandy grass, and into the bushes. There wasn’t much vegetation to hide in. The bushes were sparse.

  A vicious screech came from the side.

  I jumped, then belatedly turned toward the sound, both hands on the spear and ready to kill whatever new threat was coming at me.

  It was the human-sized vulture. It hadn’t been able to fly away. It had been doing its best to hide in the greenery as well. It seemed pretty pissed that I’d arrived, bringing unwanted attention to its hiding spot behind a dense bush and some tall clumps of really dark green grass. Glaring, it was hunched over with a disgusting fleshy blister bubble on its chest where a bunch of feathers had gotten blasted off.

  I speared it in the face.

  The vulture dudged with that long neck.

  I stabbed again and again. “Die, fucker! If I survive, I’m having chicken wings tonight!” I lashed out, pushing the huge bird back until it lost its balance and fell over with a panicked shriek. Not wasting the chance, I pounced, driving the spearhead into its back. I leaned all my weight into it, driving the weapon through the bird, feeling the bronze tip sliding through organs and bouncing off ribs or something. It was pretty gross.

  The vulture flopped and kicked and tried to snap at me with its beak, but in a couple of minutes, it slowed and died, falling limp. The eyes stared without seeing, just like that lizard person had.

  I stood over the lifeless thing, panting. Even when it’s not a human, seeing dead eyes, seeing a corpse, felt wrong. Unnatural. Something inside me was deeply disturbed by the sight. Beneath that feeling, I tried to take comfort in knowing that I wasn’t a natural killer. I didn’t enjoy this sort of thing, and even doing it out of self-defence and survival, it was unpleasant.

  Ain’t no vegan chicken wings out here though.

  I levelled to 5 from the kill. In the back of my head, I briefly wondered at how fast I was levelling. Was this normal? Was it just like an RPG where the first few levels are stupidly easy to get you hooked?

  Remembering the big threat, I looked back over at the scorpion.

  There was no scorpion.

  That side of the oasis was empty of giant, lightning-throwing creatures from hell.

  “Shit!” I yanked the spear from the body of the bird and spun around, ready to defend myself. After a panicked search, I slowed down and took my time to scan the ring of green around the water. Had it decided to come after me? Was it circling the oasis, sneaking up on me? Or was I lucky enough that it had decided to retreat back to the cave, or wherever it had come from?

  Me. Lucky. Ha!

  With a white-knuckled grip on the spear, I backed away from the water. The scorpion could have gone around either side of the pool; I had no way to tell which. So I had to back away from both. Unfortunately, there was only so far to go. Within a dozen paces, the sand of the open desert was nearly at my back. But there was still no sign of the creature. Damn thing was stealthy. At the edge of the sand, I crouched low, hopefully making myself harder to spot. Trying to quietly control my breathing, I continually scanned the oasis for any sign of movement.

  Minutes passed.

  In the sun and heat, sweat dripped down my face and arms. I felt my grip slick on the wooden shaft of the spear, and had to wipe my hands off. The minutes dragged out. It was beginning to look like the scorpion had strategically retreated as well.

  Something moved to my left and I glanced over.

  A baby scorpion was unearthing itself. It was probably coming out to hunt. It came free of the sand. Then it turned and looked at me.

  I tried to stay silent, willing it to go away with all my mental power.

  The tiny stinger began to glow.

  I whisper-hissed under my breath, “No! Go away. Shoo!” Very quietly, I tried to sidle away.

  The little lightning scorpion fired. It hit me right in the hand.

  “Ow!”

  Three meters to my right, the momma’s huge scorpion tail curled up out of nowhere, turned and pointed directly at me, glowing brighter fast.

  I had no time to even cry out as I threw myself backward.

  The lightning bolt streaked past my chest, every hair on my body, and there were a lot, standing out.

  The momma scorpion wasn’t content to sit back any longer. It was on the hunt. It burst from the grass and bushes, pincers open, horrid mouth gaping wide, and came at me with a fury.