As I come to my feet and the mage groggily responds to the priests insistent shaking, from behind the trees two creatures rush forward. Quadrupeds, they stand around 1 meter tall, they are broad chested and look to weigh around 75 kilos. These creatures appear almost leopard-like, with mottled brown and gray fur. Their slavering mouths are filled with teeth, including some exceptionally large canines, bigger than a mountain lion would have though falling well short of a sabertoothed tiger.

As they close, they release a loud yowl, sounding rather reminiscent of a large, angry cat. About 3 meters before reaching us, they pause and let loose another shriek; but this time as they howl, their faces peel back to reveal an amazingly detailed view of the muscles, tendons, and jaw bones underneath. Their. Face. Peeled. Back. I can see everything underneath the skin of their face.

What. The. Fuck.

If those humans could see at night with any detail, they’d probably be terrified right now. They can’t even see this terrifying display and they are already clearly out of sorts. I CAN see them, and a part of me wants to run away screaming at the unnatural and, frankly, disgusting scene.

As is though, I have a job to do, and even though I know I'm going to be pretty terrible at it because my class is poorly suited for it, I try to honor the agreements I make. I rush forward to stand between the two beasts and the two humans, and start trying to claw the faces off of these freaky kitties. Err. Claw their faces more off than they already are, I guess.

My trademark lackluster agility isn’t a complete failure this time; my right hand digs into the exposed muscle of its cheek, which causes the creature to jerk its head up. The swift motion was enough to cause my left hand to fall low, but I’m a lizardfolk. Although my right claw does not dig in deeply due to my pathetic strength score, the reaction it caused was enough to bring the ugly kittens head even further up. So I did what lizardfolk do when a chunk of flesh exposes itself to them. I bit. Hard. Right over top of the disgusting mass of flesh this creature uses as a face.

Lizardfolk are probably more famous for their bites than they are for their claws. We take more pride in the claws, but we often wield weaponry, which tends to take priority over the joy of using your own body as the weapon. Whether or not we are using a weapon, though, we are both willing and able to incorporate bites into our attacks.

Biting someone for the sake of hurting them is a pretty different experience from trying to eat them for a number of reasons; but one important thing to note is that if you’re biting them to hurt them, you get a good clamp, ideally accompanied with a crunch and possibly a grind, and while you'll take a chunk of flesh with you if you can, you don't stick around, one way or another you pull back after having bitten as hard as you can.

Why not keep the clench in place and make every bite flesh rending? Because if you stick around with your face attached to their body you’re a sitting target, too, meaning the person you’ve latched on to gets to take their time and make sure that wherever it is that they do to hurt you in return, it’s likely going to be very effective. So that’s the basic process for the unarmed lizardfolk fighting style; swipe, swipe, bite, back off. It takes about as long to execute as it took you to read that line.

Are there better ways to attack? If I were on Earth, the real Earth that is, definitely. Even for an ugly creature like this, if you can get over top of it and close off that wind pipe via a rear naked choke, it's going to have trouble dislodging you, biting you, and clawing you. You'll probably even avoid disembowelment. As long as you're able to keep the hold on and avoid dying in an ambush, you've got a pretty easy win.

Grappling here, however, much like with everything else, doesn't work right. Even if you discount the whole low strength and agility thing, basic physics says that if you come in low and grab someone by the backs of their ankles and push with your shoulders, they're going to fall over. That's leverage at work, you've turned their entire body against them.

But here… Here there is a system. This system says fireballs are real, that lightning can erupt from hands, that humans with wings and a 6 foot wing span can fly and thrust to weight ratio be damned, if you've got wings you can probably fly. The system has little truck with the physics of my youth.

If I try that same double leg takedown in this body, I might succeed. Maybe. And then odds are that my grip will be immediately and handily loosened. I usually won't be able to attain the positioning in the first place, though. Somehow some way, something will go wrong almost every time here, because my strength is below average, and my attack stat is 0, and the system takes that to mean that my ability to grapple an opponent should be limited.

When I go to shoot in my foot will trip on a root that appeared out of nowhere, or they'll just happen to choose exactly the right time to take a step or three back, or they'll be the ones to trip on a root while they lean forward accidentally haven fallen into a perfect splash landing on my back as I'm trying to close the gap, or they'll have just started a sudden involuntary yawn that causes them to lean forward and place my head right in their mouths…

The mechanics of fighting here are different from my old world, and the methods used here… They're bullshit. It's not that I can't become competent, again, but I will need to gain levels so that the system is willing to allow my efforts to succeed. But I have to do make it work via the system. No matter what you're doing if the system says no, the answer is no. That doesn't mean I can't do anything to positively affect a fight except mindlessly repeat a basic attack pattern, but what it does mean is that my odds of succeeding with conventional techniques are dominated by the system, and the way to improve performance is to get the system to recognize that I'm supposed to be good at a thing, which pretty much comes down to level gains, or bypassing the system entirely and changing the environment and circumstance to my advantage, influencing the fight less than by launching what it considers to be a direct attack.

These creatures have their own favored attack process, it seems. They lead with their mouth, and their claws are something of an afterthought. The second one, the one which is uninjured, attempts to lunge into me, but his ally is too close and I’m able to shift slightly counterclockwise to make him have to attack around his companion, leaving his attacks awkward and ineffective. The bite was a clean miss, though the claws scrape by my leather armor, repelled by the magic imbuing my leather armor.

The first flesh faced kitty, the one that I clawed and bit, manages to catch me with a claw to the abdomen in retaliation. It breaks through my leather and scales leaving deep, bloody gashes. I have to admit, his claws are at least equal to my own, and his strength is higher. If we were fighting 1 on 1, he'd be the clear winner. His face protracts, covering the distended mass of flesh that was so recently his face with skin and fur once more, perhaps because some fur and skin are better than no protection at all, and warily begins strafing slowly to my left.

You can still see lumps of displaced flesh near its nose where my teeth had distended and torn some of his musculature, leaving his covered face scrunched up and a bit silly looking. A wounded and silly looking leopard-thing is a lot less disturbing to fight than a faceless cat. Even with his face closed, there’s a bit of blood dribbling underneath the left side of his face and onto his neck. I would assume that was probably caused by the claw that connected. He’s definitely injured, but I’m not sure that he’s any worse off than I am right now.

Since I’m injured my health is visible on the bottom left corner of my vision. The claw they hit me with really hurt: My stomach is on fire, and even though there’s no real way to tell, I’m a bit worried about possible damage to my intestines. If they are damaged, we should know in the next few seconds. There’s a unique smell associated with intestinal damage that’s kind of hard to explain, but it's sickening, it smells like a particularly foul stool, putrid and fresh, and it's not something that you'll easily forget after having drawn the association.

At current I’m down to 6 health. That's better than I was expecting considering that I'm only level 1. Without my imbuement I’d probably be at least unconscious by now considering how close some of the other attacks came to hitting me. As the two cat things swing around to flank me, behind me I can hear chanting. Looks like the cavalry has woken up enough to decide what they are going to do. They cast much faster than I can, but it will still take a few seconds for whatever spells they settled on to finish up and warp reality to their liking. Like I mentioned before, fights are usually settled in seconds. Even weaklings like me would be able to kill most things around my level in less than 30 of them if for some reason they didn’t decide to kill me first.

The cats are almost perfectly flanking me. I can’t stay here, but attacking is going to leave my back exposed to the one I’m not attacking. Oh well, hopefully my enchantment and my leather armor can combine to let me survive for a little bit longer.

I fake like I’m going after the one whose face is still exposed. Stupid cats, why would I try and split up the damage I’m dealing in a world like this where, amputations and so on aside, you remain every bit as combat effective right up to the point you fall unconscious? After my fake to the right, I dive left towards the already injured cat, who courtesy of my feint is also lunging at me.

Welcome to momentum I think, expecting my claws to bite deeply. They don’t. They reach him, but then they catch on his retractable face, cutting in a little bit but causing little true damage. And if that’s not enough, my claws really did get caught up and twisted in the folds of his retractable skin, and with my hands in the way I can’t get my mouth in there to try and bite his face the rest of the way off. So which was this, a legitimately unfortunate attack, or a system initiated sabotage? With any given attack it can be hard to tell.

Why do I keep targeting the face, you may wonder? Because it’s the front of the creature. I might be pretending to be a warrior for the purpose of this excursion, but I’m a crappy one in this world, so keeping the opponent at the outermost limits of my effective combat range is in my best interests; I’m supposed to keep them busy, not kill them. Killing them is the mage’s job. Mine is just to give him a chance to cast spells.

The injured horror cat snaps at me a couple times, but since my claws are still stuck in the folds of his retractable face, I avoid its teeth by pushing its head down and to the side, ensuring he is unable to come anywhere near biting me. Unfortunately we really are entangled, and as a consequence there is little else I can do to avoid his claws except to try and force his head in between his claws and my body. It is not enough, and his claws are whipping around in a frenzy, reaching over its head to desperately shred my arms and my chest.

God damnit, this really hurts. I’m down to 1 point of health, that quickly. Come to think of it, this guy is responsible for every point of damage I’ve taken up to now, though his buddy just finished closing the gap, and I’m left trying to once again maneuver the injured nightmare kitty between me and him. Luckily for me it mostly works, confounding his jaws once more and leaving him with horrible angles of attack where he has to attack over and around his partner. Not so luckily, his angle of attack is still good enough to hook a claw in through my armor. It’s a surface level injury, it’s not exactly serious, but I was already down to 1 health. Frankly it's a borderline miracle that I've been able to stay standing against so many consecutive injuries considering that I'm only level 1.

So what happens when I reach 0 health? Do I die? Obviously not, I’ve told you before that I’ve been knocked out many times before, but what happens at exactly 0 health is a bit tough to describe. Your vision finally gets fuzzy, your field of vision turns black around the edges, and you feel a bit chilly, as though the reaper himself is waiting for your next action.

And that’s the problem. Any action you take at 0 hit points is enough to knock you out. You can’t run away, you can’t attack, you can’t even lay down. Whatever your position, you need to either stay there, or you do something to heal yourself, or you try one last ditch effort knowing full well that if you’re surrounded by enemies, it’ll likely be the last action you ever take.

There are 2 enemies. Even if I was lucky enough to be able to finish my current victim off with one last, desperate blow, which is unlikely considering how little damage my attacks actually do, his buddy would surely be able to finish the job and make sure I never woke back up. If he chose to do so. Most creatures have enough intelligence to either try carrying a defeated foe off, or taking down the remaining combatants before leaving themselves vulnerable while they try to have a meal.

Fortunately for me I’m not alone either, so I needn't worry as much about what happens if I fall so long as I am not killed outright by the injury that felled me. The spells that my comrades have been casting finally trigger. With a “whump” 2 arcane missiles plough into the uninjured nightmare cat. It lets loose a pained yowl; that one spell did more damage than all my claw and bite attacks combined, despite his late recognition that there was a fight occurring.

Beyond the Mages damage contribution, I also begin to feel a soothing warmth spreading through my body. It looks like the priest was right on the heels of the mage when it came to casting speed, because that was clearly a healing effect. Although… the effectiveness of that healing spell was rather limited. The darkness at the edges of my vision has withdrawn, but I’ve only recovered to the point of having 2 health. I won’t knock myself out by breathing, but at this point every second I continue to stand is a miniature miracle in its own right.

Since I’ve already got my claws tied up in the folds of the retractable face of kitty number 1, I try to put them to work by lifting the cats head up so that I can give him a good chomp. Instead, raising my hand to force the creatures head up results in my claws coming free as though there'd never been any flesh in there to catch on in the first place; I don’t think they even did any additional damage, and the change in weight causes me to rock back, off balance.

Well, so much for being a hero, this was my least effective exchange yet. Speaking of exchanges, the kitty that I’ve been making miserable releases a low growl and chomps, catching a flailing hand in its mouth. It seems to be about as surprised to have caught my hand as I was to have provided it a hand, and it only does 1 health of damage, but it has my hand now, which means it's going to be just about impossible to completely escape its claws, magical armor or not.

This is the sort of nonsense that the system likes to pull when you're trying to do something it doesn't believe you should be able to do, it manipulates the circumstances in subtle ways to turn actions that should have been perfectly reasonable into major mistakes. It was bad enough that my claw somehow got caught in the folds of its fleshy face in the first place, but when I was able to start using that to my advantage it flipped things back so that I'd be properly disadvantaged again, going so far as to ensure that I'd end up literally feeding it my own hand.

The way this system gate keeps knowledge and abilities pisses me off so much…

If I had the health to keep going I'd keep fighting of course, but immediately after capturing my hand, the beasts claws begin rending my chest and stomach. I see the second nightmare kitty sprint up to the mage responsible for causing it so much pain, biting him in the arm and attempting to knock him over. I also smell something foul.

"Right", I think, "that claw was deep. I definitely punctured an intestine this time."

Consciousness fades.