As I scanned the area, looking for potential prey, I realized that ants were more abundant than I had realized. Perhaps it was the fact that I had spent enough time observing this one ant and how it stood out against the rock floor of the basin even when hiding in the shade of a hoodoo, or maybe there were just more of them out today. There was one hyena corpse left unaccounted for, and from what I understood, ants *were* known to be scavengers, which suggested that if the smell of carrion was in the air, it might have attracted them to the scene of my previous day’s kill.

As I scanned the landscape, I was able to pick out features that I hadn’t picked up on from my perch atop the plateau. Now that I had spent some amount of time walking around and feeling the texture of the ground, I could more easily recognize parts of the valley where the rock texture differed. While the area where I stood bore a flat sandstone-like texture, the ground to the north was more jagged and rough, with darker-colored rock protrusions. Further from the plateau, the ground seemed more sandy, with any rocks bearing a more even shape, likely the result of wind naturally eroding the terrain over what might have been eons.

As I turned my attention back to the nearby sandstone rocks, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, and my eyes darted in that direction, studying an area where there seemed to be nothing but rocks. But, as I studied closer, I could see that it was more than just a bunch of rocks: several of the rocks were large and slab-like, and while it wasn’t as if I could climb under them to seek shade, they apparently provided enough shade for small bits of vegetation to sprout from there. Good news for herbivores; too bad I wasn’t one. And as I continued observing the rocks and studying their features, I noticed something even more important: one of the giant “rocks” was moving. It was moving very, very slowly, but it was still moving, on short, stumpy legs that supported a massive shell that had made me initially mistake the creature for a rock. Turtle. I let out an involuntary squawk of delight.

The turtle was massive: I knew that turtles back on earth could weigh hundreds of pounds, but that didn't undercut the surprising immensity of this turtle. It was larger than I was -- and while I was, admittedly, an infant, I was still a dragon who outweighed a hyena, which had been the largest creature I'd encountered up until my discovery of this reptile. As I crept toward the turtle, I blessed my good fortune. I could hardly ask for better prey. Unlike hyenas, a turtle seemed unlikely to fight back. And unlike an ant, it was unlikely to scurry away. In fact, if you were to rank large fauna by how easy they were to stalk, turtles would be at the top of the list. True, it did have a hard, protective shell to guard against physical attacks -- that shell was probably how it managed to survive in an environment with predators like hyenas -- but as the ant I had acquainted myself earlier that day knew, a hard protective shell was no match for my [noxious breath].

As I got closer to the turtle, I found myself growing more and more excited. The turtle was nearly as big as I was, and its movements were so slow it was almost comical -- though perhaps that slow movement (combined with its shell’s rock-like texture) was part of what camouflaged it and had allowed it to escape my notice until now. Well, no longer. This turtle wouldn’t be escaping me any time soon.

Still, I wasn’t about to let my guard down completely. Even back on earth, it wasn’t as if every turtle was a sitting duck. As a kid, I had watched a nature documentary about ‘snapping turtles,’ which had left me cautious about ever putting my hands near a turtle for fear of losing a finger. As a dragon, I wasn’t sure what threat the turtle posed to me, but if this world could be home to a dragon capable of exhaling noxious fumes, there was no guarantee that this turtle might possess some hidden abilities -- perhaps it had breath attacks of its own, or some other means of defending itself that I knew nothing about. Even magic wasn’t out of the question.

After getting within what I estimated to be ten meters from the turtle, I decided to announce myself to the turtle. If it was going to react to my presence by releasing some kind of toxic gas, or channeling some type of magic, I figured it was best for that to happen while I was at a safe distance, with the difference in our respective speeds making a speedy getaway an option if it turned out to be dangerous. I squawked as loudly as I could, but the turtle didn’t even so much as break its stride, apparently indifferent to my presence. I wasn’t sure whether that bode well or poorly. Probably, it just meant that the turtle was sure that if I did start attacking it, it could retreat into that massive shell.

I approached from behind, and as soon as I was close enough, I reached out with a claw to swipe at its exposed rear leg. Only after my swipe whiff did I realize that its leg had retracted into its shell. It was an impressive reaction speed: apparently the turtle wasn’t as sluggish as its slow locomotion let on. Well, that made sense. Carrying around a shell that might have been...I don’t know, a couple hundred pounds? That, apparently, was a hard task that required slow, deliberate movement. Retracting all of its limbs (and its head) into that protective shell, however, was something that it could do very quickly.

As I studied the (now hermitted) turtle, I saw that the soles of its feet neatly plugged the holes that its legs had previously protruded from, and the bottoms of those feet looked just as hard as the shell itself. I tentatively tapped at those soles with my claw -- half afraid that one of them might shoot out at me -- and heard the telltale “tinking” noise that, once again, sounded much like sound of metal hitting metal. I rapped my claw against the turtle’s shell, and it produced a similar noise, this time more like a “knock,” like the sound of a hard object hitting rock, a noise distinctive from the first, but not any more promising.

The turtle’s head -- what little of it I was able to reach -- was also too hard for my claw to scratch. As I looked at how neatly it had retracted itself into its shell, I briefly wondered, would my [noxious gas] attack even work? If the turtle’s shell was sealed up too tightly for me to even squeeze a claw in, would my gas fare any better? A moment later, I realized the obvious: of course it would. The turtle had to breathe, didn’t it? And all that was necessary for my [noxious breath] to replace the (I presumed) oxygen that it was trying to breathe. Once those toxic fumes went to work on its lungs...well, honestly, I wasn’t too sure about the mechanism by which my poisonous breath attack worked, but I was fairly confident that it would do what it took to terminate this turtle and reduce it to a tasty dinner. Confident enough, at least, to spend my remaining [stamina] to find out.

I exhaled my [noxious breath], covering the shell entrance where the turtle’s head had been, and waited. I heard what sounded like a groan, and I recoiled in surprise. I hadn’t expected the turtle to be so loud -- I wasn’t even sure if turtles could loudly vocalize or yell in the same way mammals and birds did -- but then again, this did not seem like the type of creature to go out with a whimper.

Still, the turtle remained sealed within its protective shell. On a certain level, I suppose that probably seemed like a viable strategy to its reptile brain: I had just revealed myself to be a dangerous predator, and its instinct was probably to hide inside its shell whenever its life was threatened. It had probably never encountered a dragon (or any other creature) that was capable of launching an assault on its respiratory system. The turtle let out another cry, weaker this time, almost sounding like the rasping of a creature in the throes of death. I wasn’t sure if, as a dragon, I should be feeling sympathy for a reptile (or if I even was a reptile myself), but I wasn’t about to let up.

By now, the gas cloud seemed to have dissipated, and I could still hear the turtle’s raspy cry, so I hit it with another [noxious breath] attack. This time, I decided to try covering the turtle with my body, awkwardly wrapping myself around it so as to prevent the gas cloud from dissipating more quickly. I wasn’t sure if I was accomplishing much, considering that I couldn’t make an airtight seal around any part of its body, the neck hole included, but it certainly didn’t seem like it could hurt things any.

As I listened to the turtle’s pained rasps, I allowed my mind to wander, if only to avoid morbidly dwelling on the mortality of the creature that I was in the process of slowly killing. I speculated whether my [noxious breath] would have the same effect upon a creature with no respiratory system. [Noxious breath] was described as a skill that [Emits noxious gas, which deals damage over time.] That didn’t seem to include any qualifiers about the gas being inhaled by other creatures. I was a physicist, not a chemist, but during my undergrad days, I had done enough lab work (and been subject to enough lab safety meetings) to know that there were certain gases where even skin contact could be dangerous, even if such gases were few and far between. That “damage over time” certainly did seem to be taking its time, however, as the turtle continued to emit pained noises even as the [noxious breath] dissipated.

I was about to unleash yet another mouthful of [noxious breath] to continue the assault on the defenseless turtle when I hesitated -- between my earlier experiences with the ant and my two breath attacks on the turtle, I was currently at [5/11] SP. The turtle seemed to be getting closer to death, but the reality was that I had no idea how big a dent my attacks were making in its HP. While I had every indication that I was doing damage to the turtle, it was quite possible that the turtle might have such a large health pool that its massive HP could outlast my SP. The "turtle with a huge amount of hit points" was a common enough trope in video games, and in many games, the defensive strategy of simply waiting out an opponent’s attacks in a purely defensive posture was one that was even named “turtling.” Maybe the turtle’s decision to hide within its shell, inhaling my [noxious breath], wasn’t an animal’s dumb instinct at all. Maybe this exchange would end with me walking away, tail between my legs and [0/11] SP while the turtle shrugged off my attacks with the same ease that I shrugged off the attacks that the ant had made on my underside when I pinned it during my previous encounter. Maybe I was the foolish one.

I had already spent 2 SP attacking this turtle with my breath, and I was intensely aware of the sunk cost fallacy -- there was no reason to keep sending good SP after bad. On the other hand, the existence of the “sunk cost fallacy” didn’t automatically mean that it was a good idea to abandon every endeavor at the first sign of resistance. While the last few minutes had taught me was that two [noxious breath] attacks were insufficient to kill this turtle, that didn’t mean that my endeavor was doomed to futility: it stood to reason that whittling down a turtle’s HP would take more breath attacks than it had taken to subdue the ant. How many damage-over-time attacks did it take to reach the center of a turtle’s protective shell? It seemed, at the moment, that the only option was experimentation.

With my satiety gauge now at 50%, I could be reasonably assured that I at least wouldn’t starve today, even if my margins were a bit slim. I had at least a little bit of freedom latitude to experiment. And as the proverb went, “Nothing risked, nothing gained.” The reward of a venture was often proportional to the investment, and if I managed to kill this high-HP turtle, it seemed likely that I would be handsomely rewarded for it. I knew for a fact that I was living in a world that had been intentionally created with the goal of providing its inhabitants with intuitive feedback mechanisms, and “completion of hard tasks is met with great rewards” seemed like a straightforward one. Even if this turtle didn’t provide many calories, surely a foe with a large number of hit points was the kind of creature that one would expect to provide a large amount of experience points.

With that on my mind, I unleashed my third [noxious breath], and once again my ears were met with the pained cry of a turtle that was, by all indications, having the worst day of its life. Still, it was hard for me to feel any sympathy for the creature -- perhaps that should have bothered me, as I didn’t particularly relish the thought of being an unsympathetic person, but I was a dragon, and more to the point, I was a carnivore. Being born with a conscience that got squeamish at the idea of killing animals was probably the kind of thing that would be considered a fatal design flaw for an obligate carnivore. And I had spent my lifetime as a human eating factory-farmed meat; the only difference now was that I was being confronted with the reality that a living thing was dying in order for me to eat.

Thus, when the [noxious breath] cloud dissipated and I once again unleashed my attack to continue the assault, the main thing on my mind was my dwindling stamina, now sitting at a worryingly low [3/11] SP. I had already decided that today was a day for experimentation, but there was still something about seeing my stamina drop so low that gave me a slight pang of anxiety, not all that different from the feeling of looking at my phone’s screen as I left the office for the day to see that it only had 30% battery life left -- even if I knew that it was probably enough to get me through the rest of the day, it was never a pleasant sensation to be reminded that you were living on the edge.

I decided to focus my attention again on the turtle, paying attention to its cries, seeing if they provided any hint of whether it might be getting closer to dying. As far as I could tell, it was emitting the same expressions of pain now that it had the first time it had encountered my unpleasant breath attack, which was a bit odd. I recalled the hyenas I had encountered yesterday being a great deal more expressive, with body language and cries that had allowed me to discern their intent to a certain degree, including moments when I had genuinely surprised them -- and I presumed that for this turtle, getting hit with [noxious breath] would have been surprising in a way that getting hit with it for the fourth time wasn’t. Maybe it was a mammal/reptile thing. I once knew a girl who kept a pet snake, and it certainly didn’t seem like the type of animal to display affection in any discernable way. Or maybe it was a matter of the hyenas being social animals who needed to signal their emotional state to their companions: the part where predators could pick up on the same signs to sense weakness was just an unintended side-effect of pack animals’ prosocial traits. So, I decided, I would be undeterred by the turtle’s (lack of) response. I continued my assault and was sitting at [1/11] SP when I was caught off guard by a notification.

[Giant Tortoise defeated! Earned 80% exp toward next level]

The turtle hadn’t emitted so much as a signifying death rattle. Er, tortoise, actually, if the notification was to believed. I briefly recalled something about the distinction between tortoises and turtles, and something about turtles being aquatic, so it made sense that this shelled creature, as a desert-dweller, was actually a tortoise. All told, I had spent 6 of 11 SP -- more than half a day’s worth -- but it seemed worth it for that hefty [exp] bounty, not to mention the ensuing meal.

I swiped at the tortoise shell with my claw expectantly, and was surprised to hear the familiar “tink” noise -- the same I had heard when it was still alive. I recalled that the ant’s exoskeleton had crumbled upon its defeat, and had sort of expected this shell to crumble as soon as the creature wearing it had breathed its last, but this shell showed no signs of disintegrating.

I had succeeded in defeating the tortoise, but it appeared as though defeating its shell would be another task entirely.

Class: Baby Dragon Level: 2 Progress toward next level: 88% HP: 18/22 SP: 1/11 Satiety: 37% Traits: Carnivore, Kin sensitive Abilities: Sprinting Noxious Breath