Gunshots kept ringing through the forest. I heard the screams of injured men from five hundred feet away, smelled gunpowder and blood. Scared as she was, Lulu formed to my chest, head and forelimbs like a suit of armor, determination thrumming through the collar link.

"I sure hope you can soak bullets, because I’m weak to Metal-element shit." I ran straight at the river and bounded over it, using my tentacles to launch into a long, high leap.

"Yuu!" Lulu replied fiercely.

As we got closer, I heard multiple human voices: men shouting to one another. I veered off course and rapidly scaled a tree to flank the battle and gain visual. But when I spotted who was actually attacking us, I let out a hiss of surprise.

A gang of five men aimed rifles up the cliff toward the pond-side ledge, but they weren't Hell Pigs. They were decked out like Roman soldiers, kind of, in regimental bronze armor. They wore Roman style crested helmets, but instead of horsehair, the crests were made from rows of stiff blue feathers. Three of them were providing covering fire for the other two, bullets spanging and cracking off the overhang leading up to our campsite. Their buddies were scaling the cliff to either side. Angel was up top with her bow, waiting for them to run out of ammo. There were three other men dead on the ground, arrows protruding from their eye sockets.

"Wait: Are those Centurions? Why the fuck are Angel's own team after her?" My sensory hairs bristled with alarm.

Lulu grumbled. "OoO-ooh."

"Yeah, I dunno either. Something about this stinks." Eyes narrowing, tail lashing, I clambered quietly around the tree into position. "Hold onto your buttcheeks, kid."

By weaving my head and tuning into my hunter’s senses, I was able to intuit the best angle of attack. I lined up, waggled my butt like a cat, and launched myself from cover. I began to get nervous when I was thirty feet into freefall and still hadn't landed on anything, but it was far too late for regret.

The only solution was murder.

I smashed into two of the riflemen and drove them to ground. Before I even realized what I was doing, I'd picked up both screaming men in two of my tentacles, crushed their ribcages to pulp, and thrown them right at their climbing friends. One hit, smacking into the Centurion and sending him tumbling to the dirt in a tangle of limbs. The other corpse missed, but made a satisfying meaty THUMP as it hit the rocks and ragdolled to the ground.

" WHAT THE FUCK!?" The remaining rifleman whirled on me, eyes white with terror.

I bounded toward him, roaring, all tentacles raised. He was made of sterner stuff than the Hell Pigs: his training kicked in, and he sighted down and fired as I closed. The bullet took me in the shoulder and blew a chunk of Lulu's mass from my skin.

[You take 500 reduced damage! (x3 Metal)]

[Lulu takes 115 damage! (-1.5x Metal)]

Oww: THAT hurt. The rifles were crude single-shots, so he only got the one round off, but it was enough to blow that forelimb out from under me. I immediately compensated with a tentacle, replacing my leg on the downstep as I surged in with jaws and claws. He squealed, twisting away, but not fast enough: I grabbed him by the head, shook him like a terrier, and slammed him into the ground until he fell still.

"JESUS CHRIST! LORD HAVE MERCY!" The surviving climber had dropped back down to run. Holding my bleeding leg off the ground, I whirled and screeched: only to watch him shriek and fall writhing to the ground as an arrow hit him dead in the back of the knee. The fall knocked his head up, and Angel's second shaft thwipped past us and THUMPED into the back of the Centurion's head, nailing his face to the dirt.

Silence fell over the jungle once more.

[Team Gladiator Kill: You gain 75 EXP. Lulu gains 75 EXP.]

"Angel! Are you alright!?" I telepathically shouted at her, before remembering she could voice speech, but not understand it. Cussing, cradling my arm to my chest, I sprang onto the rocks, gripped with my other front leg and tentacles, and launched myself up to the grotto platform with three big leaps. Angel stumbled back from me as I appeared over the ledge. A second later, she burst into tears, threw the weapon away from herself, and ran over to throw her arms around my neck.

"Hey-hey-hey, it's alright." I managed telepathic ASL this time, reaching around with my better arm to awkwardly hug her. She was a slip of a thing, so slim she felt like a feather in my arms. “We got ‘em all.”

"Those motherfuckers!" Angel spat aloud. She leaned back from me, and I realized she'd been hurt. One side of her face was bruised up, and she had a dried bloody wound on the side of her head.

A low rumble gathered in my throat."What happened?"

"I-I went down to forage and see if there were any small copper nodes I could use to repair these broken Pigs tools, and I ran into that patrol." Angel paused to shakily tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. "Th-they were friendly at first... I told them I was a cadet in the Centurions, that I'd escaped the Hell Pigs and was on my way to Hope. They wanted to escort me there, but I said no. didn't want to just like... ditch you and leave. I figured you were out hunting."

"Training, but yeah. Lulu and me were figuring ourselves out as a team."

Angel nodded. "After I told them no, they got pushy. The mood changed, and one of them grabbed me. I brought my heel up into his balls and he let me go, but one of them hit me as I tried to get through the group. Another took me down into the mud and started trying to tear my clothes off. There was fighting… I don't remember exactly how I got away, it was all a big rush. The next thing I remember, I was nearly back at the camp, trying to get to high ground or... or something."

"Disorientation and missed time when you're being attacked is normal. You handled it well," I mentally signed. "Nice shooting, too. You're a damn prodigy."

"So I've been told." The girl sniffed, and looked up at me. Then her brows furrowed. "Oh no... Noodles. You're hurt."

"Eh. Don't worry about it." There was a red pulsing icon of a beefy human arm in my HUD. I hadn't really been paying attention to it.

"No no no, that's limb damage, a Crippling Injury. It has a special status. You'll be crippled until we get some proper heals for you," Angel signed, pausing to gently examine the entry wound. "These kinds of injuries don't heal by themselves. You have to use potions to heal crippling damage. I think the ones for Legions are different to the ones for humans, too."

"Do you have any?" I scanned my Inventory, looking for potions. "I didn't get any potions in my tribute box bullshit."

"I have a couple of human heals that I looted off the Hell Pigs. We could try ‘em?"

"Uuu?" Lulu asked curiously. She had defaulted to forming a seal over the entry and exit wounds, keeping me from bleeding out, but she couldn't understand Angel's signing.

"Sure. Let's try it." I tried putting my weight down on the blasted arm, but it was no use. The thing was busted. "Lulu, something about crippling damage? Don't suppose you have any healing potions for Legions, do you?"

"Nuu." She extruded a psuedopod and shook it from side to side, but then opened a pair of arms and waved them at Angel. "Oooh-ooh!"

"Hey Angel, Lulu wants your attention," I thought to her.

Angel's pale eyes darted up. She made to hand me the potion, but Lulu snatched it off her with a limb that darted forward like a frog's tongue. The slime began to efficiently administer first aid: I felt her plunge into the injury and widen it, extracting the remains of the bullet like a vacuum pump. Strangely enough, it didn't hurt.

"What is she...?" Angel stopped signing as another part of Lulu craned up to gently take her face. The slime scrutinized her pupils, then cooed and led her through what was obviously a well-trained concussion test. She had Angel follow her 'finger' one way, then the other, then guided her to move her neck and head around to check for mobility. The whole time she was doing that, she'd cleaned and packed my bullet wound, opened the potion, and was administering the bright red liquid directly to the injury site.

"Huh." I looked back. "Well, in bad news, the potion isn't healing me up. In good news, it doesn’t really hurt that much anymore. Lulu... were you a doctor or something?"

"Nooze!" Lulu burbled back. She let go of Angel's face and gave her a little pat, retreating back to me and focusing on my wounds and injuries.

"You were a nurse?" I broadcast the communications to Angel, and for the first time since I'd met her, she actually smiled.

"Noooze!" The slime made a happy trilling sound. "Buuu... pooo-tooo nuu goooo."

"Yeah, the potion's no good. We have to find one for Legions." I lashed my tail, resigned to using my tentacles on that side to replace my arm for the time being.

"They'll have them at Hope," Angel signed. "If we can make the journey now you're down a leg."

"I'll be fine. I've got spares." I flared all six nostrils and snorted out a cloud of steam. "But hey: are we SURE we want to go this place? You just got jumped by guys on your own team."

"Sam warned me that the border forts can be rough for women travelling alone," Angel signed miserably. "But what choice do we have?"

"We could go solo. Try and make it on our own."

Angel glanced down at my injured leg. "With what? The Centurions and the Pigs are the two largest guilds on the island. They camp the bosses and the big resource deposits, the oil and copper and crystal. Solos and small clans get crushed by one or other of them every day. I've got a foot in the door with the Centurions because of Sam and the outpost... and I at least want to try, for your sake and for mine."

"My sake?" I tilted my head.

"Well, yeah. You need to find this Dimitri person and save your sister, right?" Angel tightened the straps of her pack and looked to the northwest. "There's a lot of people at Hope. Someone's got to know something about him."

I grunted. "Yeah. Well, hop on and let's go."

"I'm not riding you while you're hurt." Angel scowled.

"I'm fine. Tis but a scratch, and Mountain Trekker Noodles can still tentacle along faster than you can walk." I went into my inventory and dumped out half the t-rex meat, just in case the weight was making my arm worse. In truth, it didn't seem to make a difference.

Angel sighed, but she didn't argue. Lulu chirruped and helped her up onto my back, then lashed around her legs like a gooey saddle to hold her in place.

"Have you used the mandala yet?" Angel signed around my shoulder.

"Nope. Not yet."

"You need to use it as soon as possible. If someone kills you, they could loot it off your body. And believe me: if any of the Sponsoreds find out you're carrying a mandala, they'll be after us."