I followed the ant as best I could, though it certainly wasn’t as easy as I had anticipated. The ant’s movements were erratic, often changing direction and pace. I lost track of it for several seconds before finding it again against the sandy texture of whatever surface it happened to appear on next.

The more I followed the ant, the less there seemed to be any rhyme or reason to its movements. It certainly wasn’t how I would move if I were trying to conduct a systematic sweep of the area to look for food. Then again, the reason that I was following this ant was that (I presumed) it knew things I didn’t. Maybe it was responding to the smell of something, or maybe it had its own reasoning that I just couldn’t follow, since it was (I presumed) coordinating with a bunch of other ants that had (I presumed) explored this area in pursuit of food. I was doing an awful lot of presuming, but sometimes a guess was the best I had to work with.

At one point, the ant encountered a tortoise like the one I had slain yesterday — well, not exactly like the one from yesterday, since this tortoise was still living, breathing, and slowly plodding along. Rather than avoid the tortoise or walk around it, the ant climbed directly over it, treating the reptile’s shell no differently than a large slab of rock. The tortoise, for its part, seemed unperturbed by this. I wondered whether the ant even registered the fact that the tortoise was a living creature, or simply was treating it as part of the terrain. It was still interesting to see that the ant and tortoise, for the most part, ignored each other. Still, the tortoise could have easily been mistaken for a large rock; the only reason I recognized it so easily was that I now familiar with the precise manner in which its shell’s dull luster and smoother texture differed from that of the color and sandy texture of rock.

The longer I followed the ant, the more frustrated I began to grow with how long it was taking to achieve, as best I could tell, approximately nothing. Maybe this ant’s version of a “successful workday” involved reporting back to home base with a list of locations where there was not food to be found. In fact, this ant was probably working with completely different incentives. I was desperate to find food, today. This ant might very well be returning home to a collective where it could live off the successes of others. Maybe the ant could endure a day of fruitless searching, content in the knowledge that at least one of its comrades would find a worthwhile food source, while I couldn’t afford that.

In fact, maybe the ant expected its search to be a miss. After all, an entire gang of ants that had descended on the tortoise overnight. Maybe it was the case that for every ten ants that left the nest in search of food, one would actually stumble upon food, and then it would communicate the location, allowing all of them to converge on that food source.

I had no desire to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, but this ant was not some rare and precious resource. I had already encountered plenty of ants during my time here, and maybe it was the case that an ant in the mouth was worth two in the bush. This ant didn’t seem to be any closer to striking it rich, and during the time I had spent following it, my hunger meter was already down to 13%. It was probably more impatience than anything that led to me pouncing on the ant.

With the ant pinned beneath me, this time I took a moment to consider my options. Maybe, if I bit down, I could crush its individual legs. That wouldn’t require spending any stamina on a special skill, and while I wasn’t sure what my next move would be after that, it would at least be a place to start. With a sense of hesitance, I deposited 1 of my 2 unspent skill points into [mouth].

I frowned. When I had raised [mouth] from level 1 to level 2, I had been informed about new breath skills available, like the [noxious breath] that I had made such prodigious use of over the past two days. However, upon reaching [mouth] level 3, it appeared that there were no new skills available. Well, my mouth (and the breath attack) seemed to be the main thing I had going for me, cracking this critter open with my teeth seemed to be more plausible than piercing its covering with my claws, and maybe mouth level 4 would bring new abilities and skills. I deposited my last remaining [mouth].

My mouth didn’t feel any different, but I decided to test my jaws on one of the ant’s legs as it continued to struggle. To my frustration, the ant’s legs seemed just as hard and solid as its thorax. Bizarre, considering how much thinner they were in comparison, but as much pressure as I put on it, I couldn’t manage to bite the leg off. The ant’s other body parts were too big for me to attempt biting. Oh well, at least I still had old reliable. I decided to put the poor ant out of its misery with [noxious breath].

[Armored ant defeated! 8% experience gained toward next level] [SP 7/11]

Why did every dang ant in this valley have to be of the “armored” variety? Weren’t there any ants that relied on other defense mechanisms like, I don’t know, fire ants? Despite being ravenously hungry, I was starting to grow fed up with these ants. Gulping down this ant did lessen my frustration slightly, though not by much.

If only there was some way to crack that exterior without expending stamina. I sighed. In the end, it all came down to energy. This world operated by its own principles and laws, but it seemed like there was no getting around the basic need for energy. I needed energy, in the form of calories. To get it, I had to expend energy, in the form of stamina.

Humans, of course, utilized energy from any source that they could. Fire, for instance, utilized the chemical potential energy of combustible substances, and used that energy to “pre-digest” food and improve the body’s ability to metabolize it. The same was true even for basic things, like cutting up food with a tool like a knife in lieu of using one’s teeth, or using the mechanical energy of a river to turn a wheel to grind grain into flour. All of it was about using tools to harvest energy from nature. What tools did I have? I couldn’t even construct a rudimentary sundial or protractor. For all the time I had spent pushing rocks around yesterday, the only thing I had learned was the limitations of my own body.

I turned in the direction of the plateau that was the closest thing I had to a “home.” Looking at it from down here, I found myself impressed that I had twice managed to scale my way up its side to its surface. Now that was a feat that required energy -- enough energy to overcome the force of gravity. And yet I had managed to do it without consuming any “stamina.” Some things about this world just didn’t seem to make sense. What “energy” was I using when I climbed? Did it just cause me to burn more calories, another hit to the hunger meter? How efficiently did my body use those calories to overcome the gravitational energy of mass x height x g? What was “g” in this world, anyway? Was it still 9.81 meters per second squared?

I sighed. It was probably wasn’t helpful to dwell on such things in a situation like this, but it was the place that my brain naturally retreated to. My mind felt most at ease when I could reduce the world around me to equations, which might have been the reason that I had pursued a career in physics. That was just how my brain worked: whenever I peered over the edge of a high building, my mind avoided vertigo by calculating the velocity I’d reach if I happened to fall from that height. Yes, doing the mental math to determine that a fall from 5 stories up would result in me splatting into the ground at velocity of 65 meters per second actually helped to reduce my anxiety. Weird, I know.

I had no desire to attempt a jump from the surface of the plateau, but I estimated its height to be around 50 feet -- yes, despite being a physics student, I still gauged distances in feet, I was an American and old habits died hard. If this world had a gravitational constant of 9.81 meters per second squared -- call it 10 -- hmm, if I could measure it, that meant that maybe getting a measurement of “seconds” was on the table, if I could drop an object off the edge and measure the time to impact...

Of course, I had no instrument for actually measuring time. The idea seemed silly, as I mentally pictured myself pushing one of the rocks from yesterday off the edge and watching it plummet through the air. And, for some reason, at that moment, my mind again went back to the formula for gravitational potential energy. mass x height x g. How much mass -- how much gravitational potential energy -- did that rock have? However much gravitational energy it was, it would all be converted to kinetic energy by the time it hit the ground -- or whatever object or creature happened to be below it.

I let out an involuntary squawk of excitement. Here I had been, lamenting my lack of tools, but maybe I did have tools to work with. Yesterday, I had mused about how some birds of prey would lift turtles into the air and drop them onto hard surfaces to crack their shells. I couldn’t lift a tortoise and drop it onto a hard surface, but maybe I could take a hard object and drop it onto a tortoise. Would it be enough to crack the shell? There was only one way to find out.

In all of my thinking, my hunger meter had dipped to 10%, but I barely noticed in my excitement. I hurried back to the tortoise shell.

As I returned to the site of the tortoise shell, I saw that the ants had resumed their meat harvest caravan. Evidently these creatures were not the type to be “once bitten, twice shy,” which I supposed made sense: when an ant colony’s reproductive strategy involved producing huge broods of ants, the survival of any individual ant was inessential, and the colony could likely afford to play fast-and-loose with the lives of individual ants. Evidently, these ants didn’t have the sense to flee in terror upon seeing me, or maybe they just weren’t the type to register my presence until I got within striking distance.

I considered the situation. Having just realized the (gravitational) potential of the rocks on the plateau, I was eager to put my ideas into practice, but my supply of rocks was limited, and much of what this turtle shell had to offer was probably already gone. The ants that I was now observing were now not only doing me the service of digging the meat out of the shell, but also potential meals in and of themselves. And there was also the issue of the ant colony: I was interested in following these ants back home. Killing ants one at a time was hardly the most efficient use of my stamina, but if I managed to invade their nest, and get a whole bunch of them together in an enclosed space...my [noxious breath] seemed like the kind of attack that could prove positively lethal in an area with poor circulation. I presumed that they made ant tunnels that were too small for my body to fit into, but I wanted to at least explore the possibility.

As I watched the ants on parade, making off like bandits, I considered my attack on them earlier in the day. Pinning and attacking them with my damage-over-time attack had only given me enough time to kill two of them. But...maybe there was a method that required less stamina, and less time waiting for ants to die of asphyxiation that could yield just as much food.

I approached the trail of ants that was leading from the tortoise shell and leapt on the one that was currently furthest from the shell, pinning it like I had so many other ants before. This time, I didn’t bother trying to poison it: I lowered my head, and tore the piece of meat it was carrying directly from its mandibles. Whatever force the ant was using to grip the small bit of meat was no match for my jaw muscles. Success! I jumped off the ant, and as quickly as I could, jumped onto the next nearest ant that was carrying meat from the tortoise, trapping it only long enough to steal the meat it had been carrying. All told, I managed to steal meat from five ants before the group got too far for me to continue my chain of pouncing and snatching, bringing my hunger meter up from 10% to 22%.

I briefly considered making a meal out of the last ant, since I had already gone to the effort of pinning it, but I thought better of it, allowing the ant to escape. I followed as it scurried away, and I followed behind at a short distance, simultaneously tracking both the closest ant and the ones that had already gotten further. They were all headed in the same direction, which I presumed meant that they were all headed toward a nest, rather than dispersing and trying to find various places to hide. I followed the ants onto some craggy ground that was both darker in color and rougher in texture than most of the valley floor, the same ground that had reminded me of dried lava during one of my earlier inspections. “Igneous rock,” as I was sure a geologist would insist. Fortunately, my claws were able to navigate the terrain without too much difficulty, but I did find myself slipping further and further behind the ants, with more and more of them getting to the point where I couldn’t follow them. Part of it was the distance, but part of it was that the ground’s color and texture served to partially camouflaged them. The longer I pursued, the fewer ants I could keep track of, until finally I could only spot one ant, who got further and further away, scuttling more and more frantically, until it...vanished.

I caught up to where I had last seen the ant and searched, looking for the hole or cubby where it might have vanished. The ground, with its “dried lava” texture, almost seemed like folds of rock overlapping each other, and each of those “folds” was a crevice where a potential hiding hole might exist. Somewhere around here was where the ants made their home, but trying to find a hole among this sea of rock would take awhile.

As I inspected the ground more closely, I discovered not one hole, but many holes of varying sizes, which was almost a worse problem to have, if my goal was to follow the ants. Trying to find a needle in a haystack was one thing, but this was like trying to find a specific piece of straw in a haystack. Only some of the pockets -- maybe a quarter of them -- looked like they might be large enough for an ant to slip under, but that still left innumerable possibilities -- as I looked at how much space this craggy ground occupied, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a hundred different crevices that an ant might potentially fit in.

I didn’t know much about ants, but it seemed odd for them to build their home here. My impression of ants was that they preferred sandy ground that they could easily dig through, not hard craggy ground from recently-formed igneous rocks. (Well, recently-formed from a geological timescale. A hundred-year-old rock formed in a volcanic eruption a century ago was pretty young, all things considered.) Then again, these were “armored ants” that had a hard protective shell to protect them against predators like me. Maybe their nest needed an equally hard rock barrier to protect it.

I made a mental note of the approximate location in case I intended to come back later. I could probably spend all day hunting for the entrance to the ants’ nest, but I didn’t intend to. I had sources of food to pursue -- and new toys to play with. It was time to unleash the gravitational potential of rocks.

Class: Baby Dragon Level: 3 Progress toward next level: 8% HP: 18/23 SP: 8/11 Satiety: 20% Claws: level 1 Scales: level 1 Mouth: level 4 Wings: level 0 Traits: Carnivore, Kin sensitive Abilities: Sprinting, Noxious Breath