I slipped under the surface. It was nearly pitch black with only the faintest light above and a vague sense of gravity that allowed me to keep my bearings. I blindly swam in what I hoped was an arc so I could get around to the scorpion’s side. I tried my best to swim calmly with minimal motion because I knew the scorpion was sensitive to vibrations. I could only hope that it found being in the water confusing enough to lose me. Not sensing the creature’s legs moving near me, I quietly surfaced.

  The papa scorpion was a few meters away, floating, waiting. It was as large as a speedboat. Luckily, it was facing slightly away from me.

  I very slowly drifted closer. I had to try to make as little motion as possible, but also not take too long. The scorpion was going to head for shore soon enough if I wasn’t around to tempt it.

  Even as I thought that, the thing decided it had had enough. It started swimming toward shore, awkward and slow, but getting away.

  I kicked into gear, side swimming with the spear in hand. I got crazy close, the scorpion either not noticing me or ignoring me. Coming to a stop, I lifted the spear and stabbed the beast’s rear-most leg. I tried to jam the bronze tip into the joint, tried to hurt and cut off the limb.

  The scorpion ignored me for a moment, but the pain must have been too much. It tried to turn in place. Giant pincers caused waves as they hit the water.

  I tried to swim in step with it so we both circled at the same speed while I continued to stab. But the scorpion was turning faster than I could swim. It was also hard to avoid the legs from gutting me at that range. Desperate, I took a deep breath and dove deep again.

  I was in rough shape. Tired, wounded all over, my shoulder still badly bleeding. It was so quiet in the water, so dark, I almost wanted to sleep. I knew that was a bad sign. But still, I waited for the vibrations in the water overhead to slow down.

  As they did, the scorpion going into drift mode again, my lungs burning for air, I allowed myself to rise, aiming to the side so I didn’t come up under the scorpion’s belly. My head broke the surface. I could just make out the tail overhead. Perfect.

  I reached up and hooked the spear around the tail, then kicked higher out of the water to get my arm around it too.

  The scorpion did not like that. Unfortunately for it, its first reaction was to curl its tail, which pulled me further up out of the water. Pushing through the pain of my broken hand and cut shoulder, I tried to get both arms around the tail, then somehow managed to climb onto the scorpion’s back!

  I almost laughed in triumph!

  The scorpion failed with legs and pincers, spinning in place, furiously trying to get me off.

  On my knees, I lifted the spear high. No badass Hollywood line came to me to make me sound cool, so I just plunged the spear down, aiming the bronze tip at the joint between two plates.

  It clanged like I’d struck metal.

  I blinked in surprise. Unable to believe what had just happened, I tried again, harder. Again and again. Turned out the scorpion was the tank. Its armour was completely impenetrable. I was screwed.

  There’s a fable about a situation similar to this. A scorpion convinces a frog to give it a ride across a river. The frog is doubtful, but the scorpion promises that it won’t sting the frog. The frog agrees to trust the arachnid, and the scorpion climbs on the frog’s back. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog, poisoning it, and the pair begin to drown. The frog asks why the scorpion did it; they were both going to die. The scorpion replied that it just couldn’t help it. That was its nature.

  This time, it was a human riding on a scorpion’s back. The scorpion did what scorpions do.

  As I knelt in astonishment at my failure, staring at the utter lack of damage my spear had done, the scorpion stung me. The tail uncurled, then curled back faster than I could see. The crystal stinger nailed me right in the back of the head. I swear I felt my own skull crack like a ripe melon.

  A bright white light filled my vision. My whole body went limp. I slumped to the scorpion’s back, then slipped off and into the water.

  Paralyzed, it was like an out-of-body experience. I vaguely watched myself sinking into the water with the stars above, and then the stars were gone, and I was enveloped in warm liquid, slowly drifting downward.

  I was so tired. My eyes drifted closed. Distantly, I realized that this was it, the end. I knew it because I’d been through this same thing before. It wasn’t the first time I’d died. This would be the second. That was fine. I didn’t even care if I was sent to yet another world. Actually, I didn’t want that. I didn’t want anything anymore. I was so sick of living.

  I was sick of the way my father had always made me feel like a failure. I was sick of my sister treating me like I was scum. Sick of trying to make my way in the world, only to have my dream’s crapped all over while others who were good looking or smarter or who came from a rich family got ahead so easily. I was sick of the fact that, no matter how hard I worked in life, I was never getting ahead. Meanwhile, billionaires got richer every day, even during the pandemic when half the world shut down, making more money they didn’t even need while I had always barely stayed afloat.

  Cerise was the best thing that had ever happened to me. It had been like winning the lottery. For some reason, this beautiful, kind, generous woman had seen something in me. She’d agreed to give me a chance, and somehow, I hadn’t blown it. We’d gone for coffee the first time, which had gone so well that we’d gone for a stroll in the park after. Against all odds, despite my sweating up a storm in nervousness, we’d ended up going so far as to hold hands. Because I’d managed to find the courage to reach out and take hers, which at the time had felt like the bravest thing I’d ever done.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  Hand in hand, we’d strolled through the rose garden, which had just been coming into bloom. Minutes had passed, yet she hadn’t let me go, hadn’t tried to put distance between us. She’d kept smiling at me as if she’d been having fun, like she’d been enjoying my company, which had seemed so odd. After, I’d barely remembered the roses or what I’d said because I’d been so caught up in the fact that we’d been holding hands and she was just the best woman I’d ever come across.

  Maybe folks would laugh if they heard that, mock the love at first sight thing, but something between us just naturally clicked. It was like two puzzle pieces finding their match and fitting together with no effort at all.

  I’d cried like a baby when she’d later gotten sick. Not because I was scared of losing her, but because I was scared for her losing out on the life she should have had ahead of her. She was Cerise, the strong one, so she tried to tough it out. Fought back. She made me promise that we’d never give up on each other or ourselves, no matter how hard things got. Maybe that’s why she ultimately beat it.

  It had been a hard journey, but she’d survived. I’d promised again, just like I had on our wedding day, that I’d dedicate my life to her. To make the most of the time we had. Things had been fine after that. We’d moved on. Been happy. Life had been perfect and only getting better.

  A few years later, some evil piece of shit had invaded our house and murdered Cerise.

  That had broken me. I’d never been able to heal from it. I’d loved her too much.

  That moment in the desert earlier hadn’t been the first time I’d contemplated suicide. Far from it. For a long time, every single day had required a concentrated effort to keep going, a conscious choice where I’d said every single morning after waking up, “I’m going to live today. One more day.” Most days, that had been a hard promise to make.

  Only three things had kept me from entirely giving up. One was Mom. I couldn’t hurt her by killing myself. I couldn’t let her live her last years with the loss of a child. I loved her too much to do that to her. The second was Cerise. She’d loved me, agreed to spend her entire life with me. How could I possibly throw that life away, even if she wasn’t there to share it with me? It was a life she’d valued enough to dedicate herself to. So as much as it hurt, my life was precious, or had been. Throwing it away would be betraying her. I refused to do that. I loved her too much.

  But some days, it was damn hard to choose to live. Like the days when you’re really tired or depressed. Or when you’ve spent the last month being tortured by a hostile world you never asked to come to, beaten up in just about every way imaginable. The head wound had to be fatal. I was still seeing a weird white light in my vision even though my eyes were still closed. The many wounds all over my body were beginning to hurt again. My chest ached from a lack of oxygen. I knew I needed to surface and breathe. But moving at all seemed to require too much effort. My body was telling me that this was it, it was time to give up. Not like I was going to survive a cracked skull anyway. Why fight it for a few more seconds?

  Cerise had never given up when she’d gotten sick. She’d fought it the entire time, tooth and nail, no matter how bad it had gotten.

  I’d promised to be someone she could be proud of. That meant fighting too. With that understanding, I opened my eyes. And I saw the sign.

  In my blurry vision, white light swimming in front of me, I saw Cerise looking back at me. She held out her little pinky, just like she had that day at the hospital before surgery. I saw her mouth the words, We’ll never give up. No matter how hard it gets. Promise.

  I’d promised.

  I reached out now in the water with my hand, pinkie out.

  The vision of Cerise smiled. It was so beautiful. It broke my heart all over again for how much I loved and missed her. And then she faded away.

  I was alone again. I let out a single laugh, a precious bubble of air escaping. Even when she wasn’t there, Cerise could still drag me up and out of my worst moments. But more was needed. I had to get myself out of this mess. Dammit, life could be demanding. With that understanding, I smiled.

  I could feel the muck of the oasis bottom under my toes as I hung in the water. That damn, white blotch of light in my vision was still there, along with a splitting headache. Weirdly, though, I could kind of see the white outlining the bronze spearhead. It was resting on the bottom next to me. Smiling wider at my luck, I reached down and grabbed it.

  I planted my feet on the bottom of the pool, gripped the spear in both hands, one bruised and one broken. Then I pushed off as hard as I could. I shot straight up, legs kicking fast, arms tensed. I let out a scream of defiance, and bubbles of air streamed away. The white light in my vision seemed to grow more and more intense, probably as I was giving myself brain damage from all the effort. And then I felt the churning of the scorpion’s legs in the water over my head. I lifted the spear with everything I had — and drove it right into the belly of the beast. It sank in deep.

  The scorpion kicked about in agony. Long, sharp legs sliced through the water and then through me, tearing me to ribbons.

  But I didn’t care. Didn’t stop. I withdrew the spear and stabbed upward over and over, driving that bronze spearhead into the thing’s guts and hopefully its heart. I stabbed and stabbed until my arms were so weak from lack of oxygen that they dropped to my side. The spear slipped from my grasp and sank to the bottom of the oasis. For some reason, the light seemed to go with it, and my vision became normal.

  Feebly, I kicked away from the scorpion. It vaguely seemed to be fighting less. I didn’t care. I was done with it. I needed air. I got my head above water and inhaled. It took all my last reserves to just float on my back and breathe.

  The scorpion’s motions grew weaker. Desperately, it tried to swim to shore.

  I let it go. I didn’t care if it lived or died. If it fled, I hoped it would crawl back into that cave and stay there. Didn’t matter. All I could do was float and stare up at the stars. I was bleeding to death.

  Some time later, I started making small motions with my arms, gently drifting back to the shore. It took a while, but I did it. I felt the sand rising under me and allowed myself to rest on the bottom with my head above the water. I stayed that way for some time. I could feel my body growing cold from blood loss. Finally, I grunted and turned over onto all fours so I could make the effort to get out of the water.

  The scorpion had made it shore too. Mostly. One pincer touched dry land while the rest of the body was in the water. Even as I watched, the big guy shivered once, twitched, then all its legs curled up the same way a dead spider’s does. It tipped onto its side and died. In the water. My only water source.

  I stared at the massive corpse that I couldn’t possibly move alone, now polluting the oasis.

  I punched the wet sand and swore, “Fuck!” A second later, I remembered that I was about to bleed to death, so it didn’t matter. I crawled about a meter up onto dry land and collapsed, flopping onto my back.

  Then the system kicked in.

  The level-ups rained down like precious jewels.