Angel kept her poker face on after leaving the Praetorium. The cracks in her blank, pleasant mask only began to show when we arrived at our assigned sub-camp, Block C. It was the cellblock - excuse me, 'barracks encampment' - close to the camp's dog and raptor kennels. The air was full of barking and giant parrot screeching. It was also the oldest and most run-down part of the camp.

"That motherfucker." She fumed, glancing back at a pair of soldiers as they whistled at her. Her eyes were constantly scanning and alert for the threats her ears couldn't hear, because there were no other women in this section of camp. Block C was a sausage party from end to end.

"Right? What a dick." I kept my tentacles relaxed but extended to their full length, hovering over my back like a muscular cloak. I had to be careful not to accidentally hit people or drag tents away by accident. "Let's find Prima Falks and see if she'll reassign us to the women's section. We don't have anything to lose."

"Sure. We can make a show of setting up here, then go find her and see if she's willing." Angel nodded agreement, signing quickly with her hands held low. "How's Lulu doing?"

Lulu was sound asleep, bubbling with little wheezy snoring sounds. She was still clinging around my torso and the base of my tentacles like a gooey shirt. "She's fine. Sleeping. It's been a long day of sliming around."

"Hey babe!" A Tribune hollered from the mouth of his tent. "You need to get out of those noob clothes and take a bath! Wanna use mine?!"

I growled, long and low, hunching my shoulders up as I paused and slowly turned my head back toward him. His dark face turned an interesting cream-coffee color, and he eased back down to rejoin his friends, who heckled him until we were out of earshot.

"Even with a transfer, we’ll be sleeping with one eye open," I muttered. "You're going to have men crawling under the walls, dicks in hand."

"We… or at least, I won't be staying here tonight," Angel signed. "Even if Falks transfers us to the women's area."

I glanced at her, curious.

"This asshole knows what he's doing. I'm exhausted, you're injured and exhausted, and we're inexperienced at formal gladiator battles. His Legions are still six levels higher than you are, and past Level 10, leveling gets much slower. So realistically, we don't have a hope in hell of winning this."

"Of course we will. You've got me." I puffed my chest out, even though I was still limping along on one tentacle. "Moron Thrasher Noodles, PhD."

Angel rolled her eyes. "We've got twenty-four hours. In that span, we have to heal your crippling wound, equip ourselves, and find out everything we can about his Legions. Then we have to get out into the wilderness and level.”

"You’re letting him defeat us before we’ve even had a chance to succeed," I replied. “We can get the first half of that laundry list done in an hour. Besides, Targent is weak. He’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, he’s entitled, and he’s easily angered.”

“You don’t level your Legions to Level 23 by being weak.”

“You do if you’re Targent. I have a mandala and Targent doesn’t, because he’s a coward. He wasn’t strong enough to beat Vanara, let alone any other Daeva.”

"How do you know he doesn't have a mandala?"

"Because he knew what the inside of Vanara's temple looked like, but when you said you’d gotten and used the mandala, he got a little angry gleam in his eye. He was jealous of you, pissed off that you’d gotten something he’d fought for and failed to achieve. Once upon a time, he challenged that boss. For whatever reason, he couldn't beat it."

"That might have been before the Hell Pigs camped the City of the Apes." Angel drew a deep breath. "I pray you’re right. Targent battled his way to his rank in the clan. All the Vigiles - sergeants, roughly - compete to attain officer ranks. That means it's not just a matter of leveling. It's experience. He's probably fought and won a dozen PvP arena battles to reach Captain."

"So let’s walk out of here, and never look back." I snapped my jaws at another man who stepped out into the road and waved to try and get Angel’s attention, sending him stumbling back into the front of his tent.

Angel grimaced. "I told you why were can't. Targent will declare me a deserter, and then the whole guild will be after us."

I shrugged the puds. "Then we fight to win. The fact this guy doesn’t want to talk about Dimitri Solonov makes me want to beat him even harder."

“Funny you say that,” Angel signed. “Me too.”

We finally reached our assigned tent. It was at the end of a row right across from the dog kennels, and the selection was definitely not an accident. It was made of stretched, weather-worn brown leather, a little saggy in the middle. When I hovered over it, I got a tooltip highlighting the fact that this [Leather Tent] was at 32% durability. Angel didn’t complain: instead, she pulled an awl and catgut from her Inventory, and began to follow a complex crafting dance in the air, following a virtual minigame I couldn't see. As she worked, the tent straightened and lifted until it was more upright.

"There." She ducked in, and looked back out at me. "I'll make it look like I'm here, but you and me should camp in the wilds tonight."

"Sure. No worries." I flopped down like a hound at the entry, grunting as my shoulder twinged. Lulu was keeping it from getting infected, but it was inflamed from the long run. "Also, just so you know: crippling wounds can go to hell."

"Stay here. I'll go find the quartermaster and see if I can get some cadet gear and Legion heals." Angel stepped back out.

"Alone?" I looked warily down the row.

She hesitated, then gingerly patted me on the neck. "I'll take my bow. Do you have any coins you can spare?"

The tip of my tail lashed in agitation as I raided my inventory and handed them over. "Iron and copper. Here."

"Iron? We might be able to forge an ingot from these." Her eyes widened slightly. "We need ten ingots to make a rifle. Anyway, hang tight."

I was about to finally just up and tell her that we had a rifle, but Angel gave me another friendly pat and trotted off, heading around the barracks row for the wider, less troublesome boulevard that led to the quartermaster's tent.

"Ugh." I lay my head down on my foreclaws, narrowing my eyes at the soldiers who filtered past. Nearly every one of them gawked at me. Lulu and I were the only Legions I could smell.

Lulu gave a little yawn, and gathered her mass back into a ball of slime before she rolled off me and plopped to the ground.

"Morning, sunshine," I said.

"UuuUU!" Lulu chirped back. She formed a vaguely humanoid starfish shape, and began to stretch her little arms from side to side.

"You know, I didn't realize this, but collared Legions are actually pretty rare," I remarked to her, gaze sliding to a pair of cadets whispering to each other as they stared at us. "When I heard the rules, I figured it'd be like Pokémon or something. Like, everyone had one."

"Nuuu." Lulu twisted from side to side, like someone shaking their head.

"Not a bad thing. I’m fine with being a big fish in the prison yard. I worry about Angel, though. Whatever happened to land her here, it was bad."

Lulu cooed in agreement.

“Maybe she’ll open up about it some day.” I opened my inventory and squinted at the mandala hovering at the top of the list of items. “Anyway. Guess I should do this mandala thing while we got some downtime, huh?”

“Oohhoooh.”

I selected it, and got the same prompt I’d gotten when we’d first picked it up.

[HRIDAYA, the Heart of Earth. Meditate on this mandala to gain new abilities and learn its meaning.]

I withdrew the mandala into my claws. It was a round stone with a complex raised relief. It was pretty, like art you'd find in some New Age artist's garden. As I looked at it, the design began to crawl with flecks of green light.

"Lulu: watch my back." Clutching the tablet, I turned around so my head and chest rested in the opening of the tent. Only once the mandala was out of sight did I gaze at it.

I wasn't sure how to use it, exactly... but as I stared, the green lights became brighter, steadier, the flecks merging into rippling green pinpoints. If I stopped staring, the light faded.

I tried to relax. Took some deep, calming breaths. As my mind settled and my gaze grew more distant, the green light swelled, bathing me in a gentle emerald glow. The design came to the fore of my vision in sharp relief, the rest of the tent darkening as it seemed to float off the tablet.

[HRIDAYA]

[Earth is the material foundation of our reality: the atoms, molecules, proteins, cells and structure that gives all things form. It can be as gentle as falling sand or as crushing as an avalanche. It is the element of the Body.]

[Earth is the most complex of the elements. Unlike Fire, Earth is a composite of many things. Sand, gravel, rock, stone, flesh... all of these are wielded by the masters of the Earth element.]

[You and your Legions gain 25% HP. You gain 5% damage resistance.]

[You and your Legions gain +1.0% resistance to Earth, Plant and Poison effects.]

[Due to being a Poison element Legion, in lieu of added resistance, you instead gain health regeneration if poisoned in combat.]

[You gain +15% Stamina.]

[Your Defense Rating is now Rank B.]

[Lulu’s Defense Rating is now Rank A+.]

The green light faded, leaving me blinking stars in the gloom of the tent.

"Huh. Nice." I breathed in deeply, and as I did, I felt my body shift and grow. My lungs seemed to have more capacity than before. I looked - and felt - slightly bigger.

Then, behind me, Lulu suddenly roared in perfect mimicry of a t-rex.

[Lulu uses King’s Roar!]

"The fuck-!" I jerked my head up, almost taking the tent down on top of me. I backed out to see Lulu reared up into her serpentine form, looming over a Tribune who was sprawled on his ass in the dirt. Angel stood back from him, her face flushed red with anger.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" The soldier squeaked. "I didn't mean anything by it, I was just kidding around-"

"BRRROOOOOOARRRRR!" Lulu flared her mass like a cobra and bellowed at him again. Her roar drowned out the yapping and howling dogs.

"AHHHH!" The guy - some barely-adult ghetto punk who barely looked the part of a soldier - scrambled up and ran for his life.

"The fuck was that about?" I blinked and squinted as Angel stormed over.

"That guy literally grabbed me by the ass." Angel fumed. She was now dressed in the Iron Centurions cadet uniform: a flappy leather skirt, a leather breastplate reinforced by bronze studs, a round hardened leather cap, and sturdy sandals. The breastplate had a loose tunic pinned over the top. She looked less than comfortable in it. "I didn't hear him coming up behind me as I was walking, and suddenly, YOINK. Right up under my kilt."

Lulu hissed and swayed, daring anyone to come near us. "Agoo! Hisssss!"

"You'd think these guys had never seen a woman in their life," I chuckled, watching as Angel conjured a yellow potion out of her inventory.

"No idea why THAT might be." Angel bent over me, scowling as she examined my wound. “I want to rip Targent a new asshole for sending me to this section of camp.”

"Yeah, it was a shit move. Bad enough for a straight woman, but you don't like men, right?" I asked her.

"Huh?" She looked up, blinking a couple times.

“You’ve not so subtly implied that Sam was your girlfriend.”

“Guess I slipped up too many times to really hide it, huh?” A shadow passed behind Angel’s eyes. “We hadn’t been together long, but… anyway, no, I like men as well. Just not creepy grabby assholes."

"What about handsome tentacle beasts?" I blurted, before I'd really thought it through.

Angel blushed vivid crimson, cleared her throat, and looked away.

"Sorry. Mouth Trumpet Noodles really needs to shut his pie-hole." I lay my head back down. "So, about that potion?"

By way of reply, Angel uncorked the bottle in my hands, and offered it for me to drink. She was still blushing.

It was too small for me to grasp in my claws, so I had to just open my mouth and let her pour it in. The brew tasted kind of lemony. It went down easy. Within seconds, the throbbing pain in my shoulder subsided, and the deeply embedded bullet was pushed up and out of the injury. It fell to the dirt as the hole sealed over.

"Nice." I signed at Angel just before I got to my feet. I could put weight on my leg again. "You got any more of those?"

"I bought six heals for you and six for me," Angel replied. "I know you’re probably exhausted, but if you feel like going for a walk, I want to find Falks."

"Sure." I looked down at Lulu, who was back to being an adorable silvery blob instead of a horrifying t-rex-cobra mimic. "Say, I think I might know how we can teach Lulu to talk."

"Oowuu?" Lulu 'looked' up at me.

"You picked up that t-rex roar from eating the dino we took down, right?"

"Yuu!" She bobbled up and down.

"Well, what if you absorbed a human?"

Lulu made a retching sound. “Wuu? Nuu!”

I cocked my head. "C'mon. You'd be able to speak back to me if you did."

"Nuuuu!" Her surface twisted almost into a scowl.

"It's not cannibalism if you're...”

“Nuu nuu nuu nuu!”

“Jeez, fine. Forget I said anything." Part of me just wanted to command her to do it, but I crushed that impulse like a bug. "But I’m telling you… our lack of rapid three-way communication is going to make this fight harder."

"We could teach Lulu sign?" Angel suggested.

"Not in 24 hours, we can't," I sighed. "Besides, she doesn't have a face. Or hands."

"Oooh," Lulu agreed sadly.

"Well... we'll sort something out," Angel gave us both a tired smile. "Come on, guys. Let's go see what we can learn around camp."