I woke up, with a really weird sensation filling me. I felt no pain, only some sort of discomfort. It was similar to how it felt when I put my clothes on the wrong way around - fitting, but chafing in some places, just enough that it could be felt something was off.

Everything around me was pitch-black. I felt like my eyes were open, so it wasn’t an issue on that front. I shifted my arms, and it felt as though I was moving them through honey - there was resistance against my movements. Then I touched something hard that did not give. The discomfort intensified and I felt a shudder coming in. I could feel no hands, no fingers at the tips of my arms, which was a sensation I would not recommend to anyone.

But I forced myself to focus. To give into these feelings right now would not do. So, what did I know? It came back to me bit by bit - the floating rock, the ghost, the selections. The Fate that had been picked for me. The randomized insectoid race that - oh! Of course, that had to be why I felt so weirdly uncomfortable! I mean, I used to be a human, and insects were completely different.

Perhaps this discomfort stemmed from me being in an unfamiliar body. Insects did not have eyelids, right? Or was it spiders who... yeah, I vaguely remembered reading up on the deep lore of that super-popular story about a wizarding school. Spiders were really afraid of the basilisk because their eyes afford them vision in almost every direction, and they had no eyelids to close so they couldn't stop themselves from meeting the big snake's gaze so as to prevent getting petrified. I guess this applies to me too, since I can't blink... ugh, how am I going to sleep like this though? With my eyes open, does that even work? I suppose it has to, somehow. Same with my lack of hands... insects didn't have hands. They had... what did they have, actually? Appendages? If I remembered correctly, some insects had sticky hairs that they could use to latch onto items. But I did not know what insect I'd turned into... Hm, this thought actually made me curious as to what kind of body I actually had been randomly assigned. But without some way to shed light on myself, quite literally in this case, I would not be able to tell.

So! First order of business was to escape. I pushed myself forward, through this viscous substance until I was closer to the hard exterior, and I pressed my limbs against it - I couldn’t exactly call them arms anymore, now that I realized that they might be something entirely different. It was tough, but it wasn't completely rigid like I'd first thought. Under my efforts it began to bend, so I adjusted my position, pushed my arms forward harder and at a better angle, it warped a tiny bit more, until finally…

CRACK!

Hah, good job me! I’d punched a hole through the hard layer, beyond which my limb met no more resistance. I pulled it back in and next pressed my whole body against the small opening I’d made, spreading further cracks along the hard thing’s surface and tearing whatever loose bits I could get as best as I could, until the gap was big enough. I pulled back a bit, then rushed forward as best as I could and burst through head first into glorious freedom.

The next moment I regretted my decision, because the space I found myself in was crawling with insects… enormous insects that is, they appeared to be as big as me! Or was I as small as they were? They looked unlike any insect I had seen before, but reminded me vaguely of beetles, with six double-jointed legs letting them skitter about, a short, bulky body, and a pair of ant-like mandibles at the front, that looked quite powerful. More interestingly though, they were covered in a reddish shell that I assumed was made of chitin, protecting the top and sides of their body and leaving just the underside open. The shape reminded me of… what was their name, trilobites? Those weird bugs that’d gone extinct millions of years ago. I had a fossil of that as decoration in my home, actually! Or well, I used to.

Whatever the case, these armored ants - I decided to just call them ants for now - were skittering about, at first without any apparent reason or sense, but I quickly made out a pattern. They were transporting items that I couldn’t make out, and I saw large numbers of them marching into a tunnel on the opposite end of the room we were in.

Speaking of, we were in some kind of big, spacious room with walls made of dirt and stone, with huge roots coming out the walls in some areas. The ceiling above us was made of rock, as far as I could tell - it was hard to say in this darkness. Assuming that I was human-sized, this place had to be about half as long and wide as a football field, and the ceiling was something like four or five meters above our heads. But if I was an insectoid and these ants were the size of ants as I was used to seeing, the distances were obviously going to be a lot smaller.

Now, where was I exactly? I tried to turn my head, but found that I had no neck to turn - and actually, come to think of it, neither did the ants: their shell encased their entire front in a single big segment. So… I had to turn my entire body?

This faced me with the prospect of moving, though. I had to assume that I was the same as these ants around me, because I could not see any part of myself, save my front legs: two long black limbs each ending in a spike, coated in a slimy substance. Yuck… I pushed my thoughts away from that, and recalled my biology class from school where our teacher had explained that insects were six-legged. The ants were six-legged too, although their front legs weren’t the same as mine, so if I was an insectoid I had to assume that I had another two pairs of legs outside of my field of vision to prop my body up. I focused a bit, and there they were. Two on each side? Yeah, that's what it felt like. I tried moving them. They did. I focused a bit more and tried moving two legs at a time to make a step, which nearly caused me to faceplant.

Apparently going from walking on two human legs to handling four double-jointed insect legs was a learning process. Great! Awesome! But I didn’t feel like I had the time to learn how to walk all over again! I had to turn my body like so, and… huh? This time I was able to move. I would’ve widened my eyes in surprise but I had no eyelids. As soon as I consciously tried to repeat the movement I got all tangled up, but when I tried to disconnect my mind from moving, my instincts guided my legs back into place. Ooookay. I should’ve thought of that sooner, after all my brothers and sisters could walk right out of the gate too.

Anyway, I was now facing sideways, and let me tell you it was a weird feeling to have this broad of a cone of vision. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I believed that something was with my eyes: I could see in front of me, but also sideways, and now standing as I did, my left side beheld a giant cracked egg, green like snot and leaking the same slimy yellow substance that covered my front limbs. There was no mistaking it, that was the egg I had hatched from. My right side still had a good view of the room and the ants skittering about, but I paid little attention to that for now.

Again I made myself turn a bit, back towards the room but not all the way, so that I could see the ongoings to my left and right. There were more eggs, hundreds more, each one as big as mine. Every so often, new ones cracked open and another ant emerged from each, skittering about for a short while. I was standing on top of another egg, I now realized, because apparently whoever had placed the eggs here had stacked them in a stairway pattern so that the eggs would serve as platforms for the ants emerging from the next higher line of eggs. So this was… a nursery? A Queen chamber? But then there had to be a Queen somewhere around.

Unfortunately, this body’s eyesight was a bit lacking, I found. Colors appeared a little less saturated, and things further away were a bit blurry. But then I had to assume that this was due to me being used to having the highly evolved eyes of a human. I’d enjoyed a luxury that I was now missing. Still, I looked around back and forth, trying to focus as best as I could, until I made out a moving shape that was bigger than the others, moving through the crowd of swarming ants, towards us. I kept my eyes on it so that I could make out more details as it came close: it was some five or six times as big as the ants around it, and looked more like a bloated maggot than an ant. It also had a pair of antennas on its forehead, with the bulbous tips glowing bright blue.

“Hatchlings”, a voice resonated through my head. I almost jumped, but the voice felt oddly calming. I felt that it came from the bloated maggot that I now realize had to be the Queen. My mother in this world… well, she probably didn’t want to look this way either. “You are soldiers”, she said, “Hive is under attack. Great worms are enemy. Your order is defend. Fight to the last. Protect Queen. Protect eggs. Protect hive.”

Unanimous clicking of mandibles answered the Queen’s telepathically-transmitted short speech, and I realized the next moment that I had joined in, in a way: I was ‘clicking’ like everyone else, but the mandibles on my mouth were not nearly as long so only their very tips touched, which was not enough to produce the same sound. That aside, I did not feel very enthusiastic at all about getting into a battle right after hatching. Sure, this was technically my mother, and I was surrounded by what were technically my brothers and sisters, but I wouldn’t call them family! And I certainly wasn’t going to lay down my life to defend them! Look, call me selfish but I wasn’t a fighter, I would not contribute anything meaningful.

The ants however began to march towards the back of the room and the tunnel entrance I had seen before, making room for new ants that were still hatching from the eggs, one after another. I felt an itch in my legs wanting me to follow them, but I pushed it back and stayed in place. In retrospect, that was not the wisest decision, because my not moving made me stand out.

“Soldier”, the Queen’s voice spoke again, and this time I felt it was directed at me. I looked over, and I saw her eyes, and those of several bulky soldiers surrounding her, fixating on me. “Are legs broken? Why not moving?”

I wondered how I could reply. I didn’t have telepathic speaking abilities, did I? And I did not think that my mouth was suited to formulate words.

My lack of response did not appear to go over well. I saw the soldiers clicking their mandibles, and the Queen turned her head a bit to one of them, likely saying something I could not hear. In response one of the soldiers, a big fellow three times my size, came skittering over and climbed on the eggs until it stood before me. It leant in and locked its mandibles around my chitin shell, hard enough that I could feel it bend a bit, before it reared its head and took my feet off the ground.

Resistance was futile at this point, I realized as much. This big soldier could probably crush me in a heartbeat if it wanted, and I wasn’t eager to find out. Besides, what could I possibly do? If I somehow managed to get down and outrun everyone, my only escape route was through the tunnel, which I did not need to remind myself was no option, since that was where the ‘great worms’ were attacking. So I behaved, waited until the soldier had marched back to the Queen and set me down before her. She looked even more imposing from up close, towering over me and eyeing me with two beady black eyes, out of the six on her head. Then she extended an antenna downwards and touched my head.

“You lack feelers, hatchling. You are mute?”

Hey, I could speak just fine! Or was able to anyway, until I’d been put in this body!

“Hatchling speaks unknown words.”

Uh-oh, the Queen heard that? Maybe by touching my head with that antenna, or feeler as she called it, she was able to read my mind?

“More unknown. Hatchling speaks like Sage, when it is fresh out of egg. You have no feelers. Queen laid many soldier eggs, but you are not soldier. You are also not worker. What are you, hatchling? Are you Aberration?”

Weird. The way the Queen spoke was more elaborate than when she had given orders earlier… Was this direct mental connection somehow better than the distance telepathy to a lot of ants? That said, ‘Aberration’ did not sound like something good at all… was this about my unique mutation that I had picked?

The Queen clicked her mandibles, taking me out of my thoughts. “Hatchling, I order: read Status. What does Race say?”

Status? What was that supposed to-

STATUS (Nameless) Race Small Inferior Parasite Hatchling [Monster] [Insectoid] LV 0 Skill Points 0 Biomass 0 Traits N/A HP 0,5 / 1 MP N/A SP 0,4 / 1 Skills Mooch (1) Leech (1) Dagger Proficiency (1) Piercing Fang (1) Grip (1) EXP Modifier 250%

Woah! A window just opened up before my eyes? Or rather, before my mental eye, it felt like. It was something similar to what I had seen before, on the floating rock. I tried turning a bit and the window followed, always remaining in the same spot in my field of vision. I did not have the time to inspect everything closely now, though. The Queen had demanded that I read what Race says…

No, wait, don’t read it! If I did, I would think it and she would know!

In response to this thought, I felt a hard smack of the antenna against my head, knocking me down to the ground. It was like a mallet hitting me, my legs folded under its strength with ease. “Do not test Queen’s patience, hatchling. What does Race say? Does it read Myrmidon?” the Queen asked.

It, uh, it read… Myrmidon Sage Hatchling. And it had Monster and Insectoid in brackets behind it.

A few moments of silence, then the tension I could feel through the mental connection relaxed. “Sage Hatchling. You hatched as Sage... Aberration, but good.”

Um, excuse me Queen, what does the Sage bit mean?

“Hatchling of Soldier type sometimes become Sage. Rare. Sages weak body, but smart mind. You hatch as Sage without being Soldier first. Aberration. But Sages good for hive. Good Aberration.” She lifted her antenna off my head and turned her attention towards what I presumed was the next wave of hatchlings that needed to be addressed. Now left alone with my thoughts again, I breathed a sigh of relief. Had it not been for the Queen’s impatience and giving me what information I needed to concoct a lie, I would likely be in trouble now.

So, these ants were called Myrmidons. At least I assumed they were ants, they definitely looked like the ants I'd seen skittering about underneath rocks I lifted as a kid, or in picture books. Weren’t myrmidons a type of greek warrior or gladiator? I wondered how that name had made it across world limits, but it certainly was fitting the ants in their protective chitin shell. Well, I had to pretend that I was a ‘Sage’ from now on, whatever that meant. Sounded like something magic, or at least like I was supposed to be this wise old man with a beard reaching to my knees, knowing the answers to every question in the world. Either way, I would refer to these fellows as "ants" for now.

“Hatchlings, you are soldiers”, the Queen began to speak once again. I tuned her out as she began to address everyone with her speech, and inspected the “Status” window more closely.

There was a lot of information in one place, something I was getting used to at this point, but that was okay. I could use every bit of info. Although, why was my real race, not the one I’d lied about, “Small Inferior Parasite Hatchling”?! Rude! And those tiny HP and SP numbers were even worse! At least back on the floating rock I’d had a percentage display, but one health point and one stamina point? It was no wonder that the system divided it into hundredths. Hmm, maybe the numbers were so tiny because I was an insect now? Probably. Still, it kind of stung. Also, I wondered why I was at half HP. Hadn't I been at a quarter on the floating rock?

I also felt kind of offended that my race was ‘Parasite’. Why did I have to be assigned that?! Was this some sort of karmic payback because I’d worked a cushy job at my uncle’s company where I barely did anything and got a paycheck for it? Or did I just draw the short straw with the random 'Insectoid' selection? … yeah, let’s just go with the latter. That one didn’t attack my self-esteem.

Moving on, LV was obviously my level. Why was I at zero, though? Wasn’t it supposed to start at 1, like in games? Traits… nothing there yet so I’d have to wait until I had something to work with. Skill points sounded like what could probably be used to buy skills, but I had zero. Well, if video game logic applied, maybe I would get points per level. But what about Biomass? Did I also gain that as I leveled? Another question that I had to shelve away for later. Then came the EXP modifier. It didn’t have a breakdown behind it anymore, but I could do the math easily - I had the base 100 percent, plus an extra 50 for having chosen the randomizer and 100 more for the Brutal Fate.

Come to think of it, this was a rather bad situation I was in. A freshly-hatched insect in the middle of a hive that was being attacked. And on top of that I was considered an ‘Aberration’ by the Queen. To me that meant that even though she considered it to be something good at the moment, I would have to step on eggshells until I figured out what was safe to do. It definitely wasn’t going to be a cakewalk.

Finally, I had five skills… starting off with two really unpleasant ones: Mooch and Leech. Come on! This was just twisting the metaphorical knife! Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what they did. Dagger Proficiency I couldn’t make heads or tails of. How was I supposed to be proficient with daggers when I had no hands to wield daggers with? Finally, Piercing Fang and Grip seemed self-explanatory enough, I would probably be able to bite through stuff and hold onto stuff better with those. And just based on that they all had a 1 behind them, I presumed that that was their level. They were, after all, my starting skills.

The Queen’s antenna came to a rest on my head again, yanking me out of my wandering thoughts. The next moment I heard her speak directly to my mind once again. “You are Sage. Frontline dangerous. No use there. Not go.”

Oh, sure, that sounded good. I’d rather not die so soon after hatching.

“Hatchling focus on growing. More useful to hive”, the Queen continued. “Must reach mating age.”

Oh boy… Well this was a rather sudden proposition! But why should I be put on the fast track to be able to reproduce?

The Queen seemed puzzled at this. “Hatchling is Aberration. It bears great faults. Hatchling cannot hear the voice of the Onemind. It cannot speak to the Onemind either. Aberrations must be corrected. Mate with Queen for more Sage Hatchlings to preserve the good traits and expunge the bad. Then studied.” She clicked her mandibles.

A cold shiver ran down my spine but I decided to ask for confirmation: How exactly was I going to be studied?

“Body dissected. Skills and traits devoured. Integrated into Hive.”

What! So I’d be killed? The Queen did not deign me worthy of a response, and severed the connection. Then, before I could so much as think of planning a daring escape, one of the bulky soldiers detached itself from the group and stepped towards me. Or more accurately, it stepped on me. Its big leg forced me to the ground and pinned me in place.

Well, this was great. I had jumped out of the frying pan and right into the fire, it seemed, with a bonus nice big bodyguard to make sure I didn’t try anything funny. And once this attack was over, the Queen would have me mate with her, then taken apart like a frog in biology class. I was full glad not to have told her the truth, or I may just have been killed immediately, since I was a whole different species apparently.

How did that happen, anyway? Sure, genetic mutation and evolution was a thing, but it was small changes. A new species would take thousands or even millions of years to develop. I was pretty certain that even fleas, which were a parasitic insect sort of similar-looking to the common ant, were a different family of insects entirely. Charles Darwin would be rolling in his grave if he could see this. But this place clearly had a lot of magic going on, which seemed to override nature and common sense.

I returned my attention to the Queen’s guards, which were now facing towards the back of the room we were in, where the tunnel was. I could only catch glimpses of the one that had its foot on my back, but if I was going to try and escape from it I needed to know what I was dealing with, because I sure wasn’t going to take the Queen’s plans for me without fighting back! As for my extremely elaborate and complicated escape plan: first, keep my figurative fingers crossed that the invading worms would cause a disturbance, then if that happened, high-tail it out of here as fast as my six legs would carry me. Because even without studying the bulky, heavily-armored guards in detail I could tell that they would wipe the floor with me any day, even if I knew what I was doing with this body. Fighting fair was right out.

Another group of hatchling ants marched by me and my captor, into the tunnel. They seemed to be sent out in waves after being ordered to do so by the Queen. But given that not one of them had returned from the tunnel yet and I could hear low rumbling coming from back there, I did not have high hopes that they were winning the fight.

The suspenseful wait for something, anything, to change, was almost worse than the fear that if I did not make it, I would be killed and have an end put to my short life as a bug. Not knowing what was going on, only hearing the noises from the tunnel, seeing the Queen and her guards pace back and forth, all that combined was really making me nervous. Yet, as much as I would have liked to pace around myself, any twitch of my legs made the guard press its foot down on me a bit harder, silently warning me not to try anything. I didn’t want to have my internal organs squeezed out, so I held still, and continued to wait as the noises grew louder. I watched as the next wave of ants marched into the open maw of the tunnel, swallowing every last one of them.

Then the ground rumbled, and suddenly a giant brown worm broke through from below, tearing straight through the hatchling that was unfortunate enough to stand on the spot the worm emerged from. I watched in shock as the remains of the body fell to the ground near me, twitching a bit and leaking fluids I did not want to think about: Then it lay still.

With the worm emerging in the middle of the colony, everything descended into chaos. The ants wasted little time in attacking the invader, but the big one guarding me hesitated, likely due to a lack of orders from the queen. That is, until the worm brought its body down, picked a hatchling up in its jaws and tossed it through the air. Whether it had intentionally aimed at the big ant or not I couldn’t tell, but the hatchling crashed into my captor with such force that it staggered backwards a few steps and lost its literal foothold on me. With no more weight pinning me to the ground, I immediately scurried away, thanking the worm in my mind.

The next phase of my admittedly-not-very-thought-out plan was where it got difficult: I had to escape. As far as I could tell, the only exit out of the hatchery we were in was through the tunnel which I highly doubted would be easy to get into, let alone navigate if there were more worms there. But it was the only exit and I had no alternatives if I wanted to have a chance at living.

I hid from the large ant guard by hiding amidst the group of hatchlings that attacked the worm coming out of the ground. Like the enormous tentacle of some epic sea monster it towered over us, easily seven or eight times as high as we were tall. It was a bit of an unfair comparison since it stood vertically whereas we were on all fours… I mean, sixes, but even its body was thicker than a hatchling was wide. The ants biting into it seemed to bother it little more than an adult being ‘attacked’ by a bunch of babies and toddlers, except that adults usually did not want to kill the children.

As I stayed back, just enough to hide amidst the group and away from the worm, I listened to the rumbling sounds around us as more worms emerged from the ground. They promptly began wreaking havoc that the ants were frantically responding to by attacking, leaving fewer to stem the main force of worms that now began to spill in through the tunnel entrance. Which was really bad, because that tunnel had been a bottleneck where only a few worms could crawl side by side, whereas now they were able to spread out. If this was strategic thinking from the worms, it was pretty damn smart!

Within a mere minute the place was a chaotic battlefield. No matter what way I looked, I saw the same gruesome scenery repeated all around me: bodies everywhere, the worms clashing with the ants along a vaguely defined frontline, slowly pushing them back, leaving behind a veritable blanket of dead or dying ants and their own brethren. The big ant guards were evenly matched with the worms and battled savagely - I saw one, maybe the very same ant that had held me down, bisecting a worm with its powerful mandibles. There weren’t many worms, a few dozen to our hundreds, but it was clear that we were outmatched.

This was as good a time as any to make a daring escape, I thought. Now that the big ants were busy nobody was paying attention to me, so I could just back out and… hold on, since when were there ants behind me? Had I been so engrossed in the chaos around me that I’d not noticed the newcomers? I darted my eyes around trying to see what I could, but it was hard to tell now that a veritable sea of bodies blocked my view. Then I saw the brown flailing body of a second worm tossing several ants around, and realized that the front line had already pushed this far up. The worm that had dug through the ground was no longer behind the lines, it was part of the front line!

The next moment the worm chomped down on the head of one ant and crushed several more under its writhing body, leaving a gap that was to be filled with more hatchlings. By that point I was second in line, and the shuffling bodies forced me forward so that I found myself faced with my opponent before I even had a chance to protest.

From up close, it looked even more imposing. With my insectoid eyes I was able to see its reared-up body before me, covered in bite marks along its front and sides that looked nasty but far from lethal. It had fought back the ants that had initially attacked it and because the big guards were busy elsewhere it was roughing up the smaller hatchlings with impunity. I watched a bulge moving along the front of its body, it had probably swallowed some part of an ant it had just killed. It had reared its head, probably to make its snack go down easy. But the next moment it turned its focus back down towards the rest of us, then lunged its head forward like a snake in what was probably an attempt to swallow me whole as well. Or perhaps the one next to me, it was hard to tell.

My insect instincts saved me from an ugly death after a very short life, and I jumped up before I'd consciously processed what was going on. The worm’s head crashed into the ground the next moment, its jaw tearing off the leg of the ant to my left and probably getting a mouthful of dirt. I felt weird, I noted as I soared through the air. Did insects even have adrenaline that surged through their bodies in such a state? Everything had been so hectic and fast that I hadn’t had time to actually panic - I knew consciously that I should be out of my mind with fear, in a situation that I was most likely not going to survive. But emotionally I felt disconnected. Maybe because there was just too much to process. Or maybe my insect brain could not feel such an emotion.

I fell back down and landed on the worm’s back while it was recovering from the momentary daze after missing its attack and hitting the ground. For a very brief moment I considered the possibility of biting into its exposed backside, but the chance of anything going wrong was way too high, and if I messed anything up I was dead meat. In fact I was probably a dead bug walking already given how hopeless my situation was, but if there was the slightest hope I would make it out alive, I would take it. So, instead of going for insect heroics I scurried along its backside as fast as my little legs would carry me, then leapt forward onto the worms that waited behind the front-line to fill any gaps when one of their brethren died. Just like what the ants were doing.

They were not prepared for me to break through like that and flailed about trying to catch me, but only wound up crashing into each other as I scurried between them, hiding as best as I could. I had no way of telling how far away the tunnel entrance was or if I was even going the right way, but it was safer, relatively speaking, between the worms where I was concealed than on top of them where I was in full view. The next moment, I was forced to jump through a closing gap as a pair of worms moved towards each other, barely avoiding a grisly death by crushing, and reconsidered that stance. Maybe climbing on the backs of the worms, if only every so often to get a view of the surroundings, wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

However, just as I snuck up on one of the waiting worms and began to climb its back, a new threat to wipe out my remaining hopes of making it out of here made itself known.

With a deep rumble, the ground over our heads moved and blinding light flooded the cave. I stopped atop the worm and reared my body slightly upwards to get a view of what was going on. I was greeted by the sight of an enormous head pushing the flat rock that made up the ceiling of the hatchery to the side, exposing us all to the sunlight. It was hard to tell, but I caught a glimpse of two short horns in a V-shape on its snout, brown leathery skin and a beady black eye staring back at me. Well, it was probably taking in the sights of the meal it’d just uncovered, not looking or even noticing me specifically. Any doubts I had about its intentions were swiftly erased as it lowered its head into the cave and began to drag its grayish tongue along the ground.

I stared in horror as dozens of ants and worms were indiscriminately lapped up by the sticky appendage, which swept the cave like a giant rolling pin. Once it was covered to its owner’s liking, the beast opened its maw a bit, retracted the tongue inside and soon let it back out, with its teeth scraping off everything on it. The worms and ants began to scurry away in search of a hiding place, but the mighty tongue was already coming back down and its owner was not keen on letting its meal escape. A second lick left a trail of upturned dirt and carcasses on the ground, with dozens more bodies, living and dead, glued to the sticky appendage.

As it prepared for a third sweep the worm I stood on began to move, shaking me out of my stupor. It had probably been as shaken as me and was now running for it. I turned my attention away from the enormous hulk devouring everything around us and dug my legs into the worm as best as I could, which turned out to be a big mistake. Trying to hold on caused my frontmost legs, the pointy ones, to puncture its backside enough that the worm must’ve felt the pain. The next thing I knew, my world turned sideways as the worm began to roll over. I pushed myself backwards, but my legs were now stuck in the worm’s tough flesh and I couldn’t dislodge them in time. Just as my back touched the ground and I would’ve wound up being crushed between it and my involuntary mount, the worm stopped, then contracted its body and began to crawl forward instead. Why the change of mind? Not that I was complaining…

The looming shadow answered my question. The worm hadn’t changed its mind about getting me off it, so much as it had realized there was a much bigger danger at hand. The tongue was back on the ground and it was coming towards us. The worm, far too slow to get out of its sweeping area, tried in vain to get away, and fruitlessly struggled as the wet muscle came down on it, lifting it off the ground. And me with it.

To be born as a tiny insect, into the middle of a battlefield, with a giant insect-eating predator on its way to make a meal of the lot of us. That wasn’t just a “Brutal” fate, that was straight up unfair, I thought to myself as the ground shrank away beneath me and the dark maw opened to swallow me whole.