The green cloud lingered in the air, and I took a moment to observe the effect of my [noxious breath] attack. I inhaled through my nose, smelling it. It had a sickly sweet odor, similar to the smell of a freshly-lit cigarette. Granted, cigarettes smoke wasn't the sort of odor I had an intense familiarity with. I had never been a smoker, and in fact I had never even so much as tried a puff of a cigarette. However, whenever I walked by smokers on the street and managed to catch just a whiff, there was something in the smell that I found oddly tantalizing. Maybe that's part of why I had always been afraid to try a cigarette: the fear that I might discover that I enjoyed it too much. My philosophy had always been that if I couldn't enjoy something in moderation, it was worth avoiding it altogether to avoid the risk of excess and indulgence. But my resolution to never light up was one made without the consideration that I might one day wake up in the body of a dragon, and that, like many rules, would have to be broken.

Whatever it was I was smelling, it wasn't unpleasant, quashing any fears that this "noxious breath" would be something that I would find to be, well, noxious.

As the cloud slowly dissipated I made note of the smoky cloud's size (several feet wide at the end of the cone), range (perhaps five feet), and approximate duration (the cloud had started to visibly dissipate within several seconds of my breath completing, but it was nearly a minute before the haze fully faded away). According to its description, [noxious breath] was evidently one of those skills that "scaled with mouth level," meaning that any future skill points I invested into [mouth] would have the effect of making my existing breath attack stronger, in addition to likely unlocking higher-level breath skills. However, it wasn't clear yet what part of [noxious breath] scaled with level. Would higher mouth levels give my breath a longer range? A wider cone? Longer duration? Increased lethality?

Those were questions that I would have an easier time answering once I had access to higher mouth levels to test with. For now, it was time to find some food.

I noticed my [SP] meter had dropped to [10/11] with my use of the breath attack, indicating that I didn't have the luxury of experimenting too much, even ignoring the time constraint of my ever-dwindling hunger meter (still at 50% satiety).

I descended the plateau at its shallowest grade, which was on its south side, but I decided to avoid the hyenas to the south and instead circled around the plateau, looking for something that might be a source of food. Luckily, it didn't take long for me to spot an insect scuttling along not too far from where I stood. I followed it with my eyes as it scuttled into the shadow of a hoodoo and stopped moving, then began following it with my legs.

I slowed my crawl as I got closer to the insect, but it didn't so much as flinch as I approached. It was unclear to me whether its total lack of movement was because it was oblivious to my presence, or just confident in the ability of its armor shell to protect it from my attacks. Evidently one of the benefits of its hardened carapace was the need for less vigilance and caution, even in the presence of a dragon (albeit a recently-hatched one who had only just learned how to breathe dangerously). I recalled my encounter with an identical insect yesterday, and the metallic *tink* sound when I managed to land a blow on it with my claw. Well, a hardened shell probably wouldn't be much use against my newly-acquired breathing skill. I crawled up to ant until I was within several feet, then opened my mouth and let my [noxious breath] billow forth.

The green cloud enveloped the ant, but a moment later I saw the ant quickly scuttling out of the cloud, running out of the hoodoo's shadow. I attempted to follow it at a non-sprinting pace for several steps before it became evident that the ant was too fast for me to follow without exerting myself. For a brief moment, I considered sprinting after myself, but now that I had an actual breath attack, my stamina seemed too precious to wantonly spend it chasing after ants, especially considering the success I had had (both yesterday and today) in finding armored ants to launch a sneak attack against. Chances to chase insects did not seem to be something in short supply, while my [SP] seemed to be a much more limited resource, so I followed the ant with my eyes as I considered my next course of action. Sprinting might be worth it to try and prolong an encounter if I was in a position to press an advantage, but for now, I was content to observe.

Of course, I should have considered the possibility that the ant would just run away when I breathed at it. The skill description on my [noxious breath] skill identified it as doing "damage over time," but it said nothing about incapacitating foes. It now seemed obvious that an ant surrounded by a green cloud dealing it damage over time would simply move out of the attack's area of effect.

For a moment, I considered whether I had made a mistake in choosing [noxious breath], but it was doubtful that either [cold breath] or [hot breath] would have fared any better in the same situation. At any rate, there wasn't much sense in wistfully thinking about the choices I could have made -- the important thing was to think about what to do now.

The fact that my [noxious breath] seemed to only deal damage to targets that were currently enveloped in its cloud did limit its usefulness in the absence of any skill capable of incapacitating foes. On the other hand, perhaps my breath attack could still be useful as a defensive measure, a sort of "crowd control" to discourage attackers from entering a certain area.

Perhaps killing something to eat would come down to using my physical strength after all. That ant had a hard shell that my claws were unable to penetrate, but when it came to dealing with something covered in a protective shell, blunt force trauma might succeed where sharp claws had failed. After all, if you were attacking someone wearing a thick plate of armor, clubbing them over the head would probably be a better strategy than trying to stab them in the breastplate. The ant was significantly smaller than I was -- like the ant I had seen the day before, about the size of my head -- and while it might be able to stand up to the sharpness of my claws, it might not fare so well against the full weight of my tail. I spun around a moment, flexing my tail, the same tail that had managed to inflict lethal wounds on several hyenas. Well, gravity had done some of the work in that case, but I had confronted predators, and my rear appendage had managed to save my rear end (and the rest of me, too).

I began tracing a trail around the perimeter of the plateau, keeping my eye out for anything else. An ant was one possible form of prey, and one I was likely to spot again considering that I had already seen two in my short time exploring this desert, but I was open to the possibility of encountering something else. I not-so-secretly hoped that this canyon held other critters eligible for consumption, and perhaps some not quite so heavily armored as the ants.

My patrol around the north side of the plateau continued until I spotted another ant. Whether it was the same one I had seen before or just another member of the same species wasn't something I could quite discern at this point, but whatever the case, it seemed not to notice (or not to care) about my presence as I crept up behind it. I got to within striking distance before I swung around 180 degrees, smacking the ant with the full force of my tail.

I watched as the ant was sent soaring through the air, and it collided with the sheer wall surface of the plateau. I moved in to try and land another blow, but by the time I had gotten close enough to try and make another attempt at an attack, the ant was already upright and beginning to scuttle away. It wasn't the first time I had watched an ant scuttle away. But this time, I had actually managed to land a hit. It had bounced when it hit the plateau, and bounced again when it hit the ground, rather than absorbing the impact of the landing with its legs. Even without my extensive physics background, I knew that force was proportional to acceleration, and the biggest acceleration occurred when objects bounced on impact rather than coming to a complete stop. A hard, protective covering couldn't save you from the effects of that kind of force, any more than a suit of armor could prevent you from becoming injured when you jumped off a building. Odds seemed pretty good that a living creature couldn't survive too many blows like that.

There was only one way for me to test that hypothesis. Up until now, I hadn't deigned to use my stamina to sprint in pursuit of an ant. Now, it seemed like it was time.

I chased after the ant at full speed, watching as my [SP] meter flashed to alert me that I was using that precious resource in my pursuit. Running at full speed, I managed to close the distance between me and the ant. It made sense that my top speed exceeded the ant's, considering how long my legs were in comparison, though there was no way for me to know how much more stamina this creature had, not without lengthy experimentation that I wasn't prepared to do today. Once within striking distance, I stopped my sprint long enough to swing around and smack the ant with my tail. Unfortunately, hitting a moving target proved to be more difficult than striking an enemy who I had caught unawares, and I hit the ant at an awkward angle that didn't deliver the full impact of the previous blow. The strike was enough to lift the ant from the ground, but it traveled only a short distance and didn't seem to take much damage upon impact as it landed on its feet and resumed its retreat.

I regained my bearings and resumed sprinting. As I ran after the ant to close the distance, I considered just how much effort I was investing in killing a relatively small creature. Was this really the way to hunt prey? Most predators had a way of incapacitating their prey, usually by dealing a lethal or injurious strike with the first blow. I thought that my [noxious breath] might be useful for this, but evidently that attack was purposed more for damaging than any kind of status ailment. Considering the rate at which my stamina bar was draining, now down to [8/11], it didn't seem that I would be favored in a battle of attrition.

I had been promised a world with "game-like" mechanics, but if this were a video game, an enemy encounter would simply lead to a fight to the death, a battle where a dragon could easily triumph over a mere insect. Unfortunately, the world's designer evidently didn't intend for a predator's life to be so easy. Yesterday, the relative ease of retreat had worked in my favor. Now, it was an obstacle I had to contend with.

I needed to find a way to incapacitate the ant, or at least force a fight that I could win. If I could snap my jaws around it, that would probably put an end to things, but the ant was bigger than my head, and though I knew some snakes had the ability to unhinge their jaw to swallow things bigger than their head, I didn't seem to possess that capacity. The presence of my teeth meant that my jaws were probably meant to rip and tear flesh, rather than swallow large things whole. My jaws weren't enough to crush the ant; crushing it to death would probably take the whole weight of my body.

Crushing it with my whole body? Now there was an idea. One worth trying, at the very least.

As I closed in on the ant, I made a leap of desperation, jumping into the air and letting the momentum of my sprint carry me forward as I landed on top of the ant, planting my full weight against it. As I fell to the ground, trapping the ant underneath me, I expected to hear the sound of something breaking. But I didn't hear anything that sounded like cracking or shattering in the ant's armor shell; I could only feel its bulbous form pressing upward into my chest.

I spread my limbs outward, doing my best to flatten myself against the ground on top of the ant. I felt it struggling underneath me, but it wasn't able to escape. I felt a pinch on my belly, and watched as my health bar started flashing.

[You are Impaired - Weakened perception and dexterity]

This ant still had some bite to it, forced to fight now that flight was no longer an option.

The information that I was impaired (temporarily, I assume) didn't bother me as much as the pain in my abdomen. No matter the consequences, getting pinched in the chest was far from being a pleasant sensation. Despite the fact that my health bar was flashing, I didn't seem to be losing health at a significant rate, even as I felt another pinch from what I presume must have been the ant's mandibles. Still, I wasn't about to let this prey go over a bit of pain, and it didn't seem to pose any immediate danger to me.

However, I wasn't sure that I posed any real danger to it. Due to the ant's awkward positioning under my abdomen, it wasn't as if I could swipe at it with my claws; I didn't have nearly enough joints for that. I had thought that simply landing on the ant might be enough to subdue it, like squashing a bug, but this bug was not one to be easily squished. Whatever damage I might have dealt by landing on it, it was still evidently strong enough to struggle and try to bite its way out, and if it was healthy enough to bite, it was probably healthy enough to run away if I ever released it. My experience fleeing from the hyenas yesterday had taught me that loss of health didn't seem to impair my ability to flee, and I could only assume that the same applied to this ant. It seemed that all I had accomplished by landing on the ant was pinning it for as long as I rested on it.

But maybe that was enough.

Though my limbs weren't flexible enough to swipe at something located directly under my abdomen, my neck was capable of pointing downward. I tucked my snout against my chest and exhaled a dose of [noxious breath], letting it fill the air under and around me.

The struggling of the ant under me grew more frantic, and I felt several sharp bites, but I stayed steady. Relying on an attack that dealt damage over time rather than delivering it all in a single burst inevitably meant that patience would be an important part of the equation, so I simply waited for a minute until the struggling finally stopped.

[Armored ant defeated! Earned 8% experience toward next level.]

I lifted myself off of the ant, and saw that its hardened shell was now splayed open, exposing a more tender body. I tentatively poked at the tender body with a claw, and my claw immediately pierced the black fleshy blob.

Now this is how an insect ought to be.

I set about gobbling up the insect's soft remnants, and it wasn't until I had hollowed out its armor-like exoskeleton that I realized just how ravenously I was eating, with my head buried in the insect's split-open carapace. As a human, I had gotten into the habit of using my hands to lift food to my mouth, but here I was operating with a dragon's instinct, and evidently a dragon's instinct was to move his mouth to where the food was, rather than shovel the food toward where his maw waited.

As I finished devouring the ant, I noticed my hunger meter bump up from 48% satiety to 51%. That was a bit worrying. I had spent what felt like a significant amount of effort to earn that kill, and perhaps more significantly, between my sprinting and my breath attack, my SP meter was already down to [7/11]. I'd lost two points of stamina in sprinting after the ant, one point from my earlier experimentation with my new skill, and a single point of stamina to actually deliver the lethal [noxious breath].

Still, inefficiency was bound to be part of the learning process, and I considered myself a fast learner. Now that I had figured out what seemed to be a fool-proof method for incapacitating smaller prey and killing it, I could probably eliminate the need for sprinting if I simply led with my body slam after sneaking up on an enemy. If I could continue killing identical insects with an efficiency of 1 SP per kill and gaining 3% satiety from each ant I consumed, that meant that a single day's hunting could add up to satisfy 33% hunger. I had gone to sleep last night with barely more than 50% satiety, so 33% satiety from a day of hunting was still putting me below the rate that I needed to avoid starvation.

If I leveled up enough to increase my stamina cap to 16 SP, then translating 16 SP into 16 ant kills per day would give me enough food to satisfy 48% satiety per day, which seemed to be above starvation level, but given that I had started with a max SP of 10 and had only just increased my max SP to 11 by leveling up, it would take awhile to reach that point. I needed a way to make my hunting more efficient.

One possible approach was to try and find a way to defeat ants without using my breath attack or otherwise expending SP. Another possibility was to stop wasting time with these ants and seek out bigger prey -- but bigger prey could require more time, and perhaps more significantly, more SP to kill. The duration of my [noxious breath] seemed to only be about a minute, which was enough to kill an ant, but would that be enough to kill a larger form of prey?

As I pondered ways to make my hunting more efficient, I looked at the ant's armor shell. My carnivore trait allowed me to consume the remains of enemies. Did this carapace count? At the edges where it had split open, I could see fractures, and now that it was splayed open, the shell's thin structure was exposed in a way that I could actually fit part of it between my jaws. I leaned down and tried to take a bite, and my teeth easily snapped through the exoskeleton with a satisfying crunch. A moment of chewing quickly pulverized the portion of the shell that I had bit off, and I devoured the remainder of the ant's remains, gaining 1% more satiety to bring my hunger meter up to 52%.

As a child in school, I had never been shy about throwing away portions of the meal that had been packed for me, much to the chagrin of one of my more environmentally-minded school teachers who taught us that being a good steward of the land meant using every part of the buffalo. Well, at long last, it was time for me to do her proud. I licked the ground clean of what remained of the ant's fractured exoskeleton, ensuring that no part of it would go to waste.

With all evidence of the deceased ant completely erased, I looked up and scanned the horizon, looking for my next kill.

Character sheet:

Class: Baby Dragon

Level: 2

HP: 18/22

SP: 7/11

Satiety: 52%

Strength: 7

Dexterity: 6

Constitution: 4

Perception: 5

Will: 4

Charisma: 2

Claws: level 1

Scales: level 1

Mouth: level 2

Wings: level 0

Traits:

Carnivore

Kin sensitive

Abilities:

Sprinting

Noxious Breath