We dodged just in time. Angel dove and rolled into the tunnel she’d trapped, while I ducked and flattened to the ground. The spinning ball of magma streaked by in a blinding blaze of heat, pure white in my thermal vision, and exploded against the wall behind me.

“Well, Noods, you wanted a fire-type legion,” I thought to myself, tensing up into a crouch as the Legion lumbered into view.

The Skarpo was part frog, part snapping turtle. It was about the size of a minivan and was armored with thick, smoldering black plates, with a turtle-like head. Its hands were weird. They looked like lacrosse scoops, curved, clawed, and heavily webbed.

[You have identified new Legion – Skarpo: A Body/Fire/Earth elemental who lives in the subterranean caverns around volcanos.]

“Jeez, thanks. I never would have guessed that these things lived…“ I trailed off as the Skarpo plunged one of its lacrosse-stick hands into the wall. The scoop tore a boulder-sized hunk of obsidian free, liquifying it into molten glass.

Lulu let out a fearful cry as I dived away, desperately avoiding the flaming projectile as it seared overhead and smashed into the cavern wall with enough force to knock Angel off her feet. The roll carried me forward: I lunged at the Skarpo with a bestial snarl, slashing with claws.

The ebony tips scraped off its armor, heat searing through my hands. No damage.

“Lulu! I could really use a Water Saber about now!” I dodged the Skarpo’s return swing. The thing’s fist crunched into the wall and sunk about it a foot into it. It wasn’t just fast: it was monstrously strong.

Lulu let out a bubbling cry of terror at the sound of the impact. She didn’t unleash Water Saber like I’d asked. Instead, she went to her default: She spread over my skin and formed Liquid Armor, quivering the whole time.

“Dammit, Lulu! Don’t make me order you!” I snarled as the Skarpo smashed its other fist into my forequarters from the side. The blow spun me around on the loose soil beneath us; I followed the momentum and donkey-kicked the thing right in the face.

[You take 183 reduced damage.]

[Lulu takes 93 reduced damage.]

The blow snapped the Skarpo’s head back. My claws didn’t hurt it much, but it left the Skarpo’s throat open for Angel’s bullet.

[Angel deals 294 enhanced damage.]

The girl fired with trained precision, ripping open its jugular. Well – the place where the jugular would be on an organic creature, at any rate. The round tore a great flood of magma from its neck, sending it reeling back with a piercing screech.

“Lulu! Water Saber! NOW!” I snarled.

Lulu briefly struggled against the command impetus of the collar before obeying. She bunched up between my shoulders, forming herself into a turret, and blasted a jet of water with enough pressure to strip stalactites off the ceiling and core a hole into Skarpo’s smoldering shell. It shrieked again as the saber dropped its HP by another 448 points.

“SCREEE!” The Skarpo desperately reached for another handful of earth; I blasted it with telekinesis, and it dropped the ball of lava before it could throw.

“Keep the pressure on!” Angel called aloud, her voice bouncing off the tunnel walls.

She fired another shot, dropping its leg on one side. I bounded toward it, jaws agape, and leaped for its damaged neck.

The creature let out a warbling yowl, jaws twisting to meet mine. Our mouths struck together and locked, but while the Skarpo was stronger, I had four limbs it didn’t. As we wrestled, my tentacles shot past, twining around the Legion’s wrists.

“Water Saber!” I snarled mentally at Lulu, still huddling fearfully against my skin.

“Huu!” The slime let out a determined grunt as she rolled up over my shoulders, and lashed out with a second water cannon, this time at point-blank range. I wrenched my head aside, and the Water Saber took the Skarpo right in the face. It blubbered with another tea-kettle screech as the water struck its neck and caused the torn flesh to harden and crack. Angel’s bullets widened the gaps now appearing in its carapace, but the Skarpo wasn’t done yet. Roaring in pain, it crushed me against its torso and charged at the cavern wall, slamming my back into the sharp-edged obsidian lancing from the sides of the tunnel. Spikes of black glass pierced my hide, stabbing deep into the soft tissue beneath.

[You take 334 damage.]

“GOD DAMMIT!” I hung on grimly, clawing and tearing and kicking, as Lulu panicked and began lashing out with pseudopods, slapping the Skarpo instead of blasting it. “Lulu, don’t pattycake it! Use water attacks, for fucks’ sakes!”

The slime shrilled, slicing out with weaker jets of water. The spikes on the wall ground ever deeper into my body, decimating my health… until after what seemed like an eternity, a bullet punched through the back of the Skarpo’s head and blew out of its eye, barely missing my face.

[Angel scores a critical hit. 588 Enhanced damage.]

[You have killed Skarpo. You gain 209 EXP.]

The thing sagged, then collapsed to the ground. Groaning, I pulled myself off the wall, slumping forward as frothy blue blood poured from my wounds. When I tried to put my left foot down, it folded underneath me. My hip was dislocated.

Lulu sloughed off my body to the ground, gibbering with panicky sounds of fear. By contrast, Angel was deadly calm. She skidded up to me with potions ready to go – one blue, one yellow. I drank them together, and within seconds, the throbbing puncture wounds stopped bleeding and began to seal up. My pelvis contracted, just before my hip slithered painlessly back into its socket with a nasty wet crunching sound.

“Well, that was a shit show.” Angel signed, looking at Lulu with concern. “What happened, Lulu?”

Confused, I looked over at Lulu. She cringed back from us against the wall.

“Nuuu…” she moaned, tucking herself into a ball.

“I don’t get it. She was just fine in the other two fights we went through,” I thought back to Angel.

Angel grimaced, gaze shifting from me to Lulu. The slime did a reasonable impression of a hunched humanoid figure with their arms around their knees, quivering like a plate of jello. Angel patted me on the shoulder, then went to her and crouched down.

"Hey, Lulu. It's okay," she voiced. "I was scared by this stuff early on, too."

Lulu burbled sadly, and shook her 'head'.

"I can't hear her, and she doesn't have lips to read," Angel signed to me. "Does she talk?"

"Nah. She makes noises like 'ooo' and 'blub blub'. But she can understand me, if I talk to her telepathically.”

"She can't communicate back?"

I scratched my nose with the tip of one noodle-claw. "Empathically, sort of? I still think she's gonna have to eat a human or three before she gains speech, telepathic or otherwise."

"Was there anything different about this fight compared to the rex attack?"

"Yeah. We heard the rex coming," I replied. "The thing chased us for a while. It was bright out, day time... and it backed us into a corner. So it triggered her survival instincts, I guess. The turtle Legion we fought… that was also daytime. Open area. We had time to analyze it."

"Right. And this fight took us by surprise in the dark, in a narrow tunnel, and underground." Angel reached out, and lay a reassuring hand on Lulu's 'shoulder'.

The slime craned toward her. "Ooo?"

"It’s alright to be scared. You don't have combat reflexes yet," Angel voiced firmly. "We'll teach you how to handle fights like this. You have to pull together, but everything will be alright, okay?"

“I’m going to have get comfortable ordering her around in battle.” I sighed, and sat down on my haunches. "We're wasting time. Targent isn't gonna hold our hands and tell us everything's gonna be okay during our duel tomorrow."

"No, he'll lay on the machismo like an unfeeling dickhead." Angel shot me a sharp look.

If I could have rolled my eyes, I would have. But guilt pricked at me anyway, as the dim memories of brawling with another man in front of my terrified sister resurfaced.

"What a fucking team we make," I sighed. "One deaf, one mute-"

"And one with the emotional intelligence of a toddler," Angel snapped with her hands.

"I didn't realize I was thinking AT you." I rumbled.

"You're not. You're accidentally broadcasting your tantrum, big boy. So how about we stop bitching at one another, and do something constructive?"

I bristled. "I don't have to keep helping you. I can take Lulu and walk right out of this actual goddamned hellhole."

"Then you'll still have the same problem." Angel rose and turned on me. "And that problem is that you can't bully Lulu into being good at combat."

I rose to my feet, towering over both of them. A flash of memory passed through my mind's eye: of lying on the road, dying, a thin, cruel-featured man looming over me. White hair. Platinum cyberlines. His fist cocking back over my face. The memory – the burning sense of humiliation and loss – made me look at Lulu again. She was hunched with shame at her own fear.

"So what do we do? We don't have time to train her." I padded over to the corpse of the Skarpo. The roast chicken icon on my HUD bars became crossed out when I focused my attention on it, marking it as inedible. It only had two things in its inventory: [Obsidian x 100] and [Coal x 80]. "I can order her to do shit, but I don't like it."

"Does it help when Noodles orders you?" Angel voiced to Lulu.

"Mmm… uuu." Lulu bobbled her 'head', but not with any great enthusiasm.

"How am I supposed to know what orders are okay or not?" I snapped back at them. "If I had it my way, I'd go kill a couple of Hell Pigs and make you Absorb them so you could learn to talk."

Lulu shook, and hid behind Angel’s legs. “Nuuu.”

"Exactly. The orders I want to give you aren’t necessarily going to be ones you like." I glared back down at the dead Skarpo. "I order you to absorb this Skarpo."

"Nuu." The Limne oscillated from side to side, as if shaking her head. She was still peeking from behind Angel’s knees.

I was briefly at a loss. "No? What do you mean, no?"

"Too buuu."

"Oh." I blinked a couple of times. "Wait. This is a Large Legion, isn’t it? It's too big."

"Ooo," Lulu agreed sadly.

"This is a second evolution Skarpo. It's why it was so fast, and why we got so much EXP for it," Angel signed. Her expressions were still a little cool. "If Lulu can only absorb medium-sized Legions, we need a juvenile still in its first instar. They're deeper back in the caverns, and given this one's a female, it probably has a nest."

"Great. As if I didn't need to feel any worse - now we're gonna go kill some baby Skarpo, that I will have to force my non-consenting slime girl to eat." I lashed my tail irritably, not really caring if Angel got clipped. If she was so wise and all-knowing, she could get out of the way. "Lulu, you were just fine about trying to eat the damn Rex. Why the hell won't you eat Legions?"

"Huu-moo." She pointed at herself, then at me.

"Not all Legions were human. Most of them are just digital NPCs, same as the monsters and the plants and shit. Some of us might be run on human data, but not all of us. I mean... think about how that thing reacted to us. There was no way it was a person."

Lulu seemed to consider this for several long moments. Then she let out a mournful sound, and pointed down the hallway. "Baa-buu?"

"Yes. We'll find a baby Skarpo, you eat it, and bam. Fire attacks."

The Limne made a bubbling, wheezy sound. A slimy sigh. "Ooooh."

The three of us were still tense as we broke from the corpse and went deeper into the tunnels. Angel stayed ahead with her torch, holding the long staff of it like a weapon with her rifle slung over her back. Lulu rolled along, lost in thought. I followed up behind, wary of ambushes from the gaping tunnel mouths. Angel took out several bats as they burst from the darkness toward us, gunning them down with precise shots.

We found the Skarpo's nest after about ten minutes of walking. Sure enough, a baby turtle-frog was waiting for us there, huddling down into the warm stone cup. It was about the size of a small pudgy pony, chirping to itself as it flippered around. It didn't seem to recognize that it was in any danger as we drew up to the edge of the nest.

"Okay. I gotta say… this already feels bad," I remarked to Angel.

She sighed. "Yeah, it does."

"But we're gonna do it anyway, aren't we?"

"Yeah. It's Level 5, so it will have its Prime Ability, Magma Toss, and not much else. Which is perfect." Angel paused for a moment. "Remember what you said to Lulu before. It's not real. It's just digital data."

The Skarpo hatchling flopped over onto its belly, smacking its turtle-like beak a couple of times. Its eyes narrowed to contented golden slits.

"Lulu, look away." I raised my tentacles high, the onyx tips gleaming in the flickering torchlight. "This might be a little messy."

Lulu, who had been cooing at the baby Skarpo, slumped back and spread out over the floor like a depressed blancmange.

I drew a deep breath and focused on the hatchling. It chirped softly in its throat, nuzzling into the sand as it dropped off to sleep.

The tentacles sagged. Angel looked at me expectantly, her brows knitted.

"I fucking can't." Groaning, I dropped them along my back, and rested my chin on the edge of the nest. "Will it die if we leave it here?"

"Maybe." Angel checked one of her menus: I could see the faint ghostly outline of it, but not the contents. "Hmm... Skarpos eat obsidian at all stages of their life cycle. So if it has enough food, probably not."

"God fucking dammit." Restlessly, I withdrew the obsidian I'd looted from the bigger Skarpo and unloaded the lot into the nest like a jackpot full of coins. "There you go, you adorable little shit."

The hatchling burped up a little bit of lava, and clacked its little beaky turtle-face again.

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[You have new messages.]

"Seventy-eight unsubs? Because I spared the baby turtle?" I glanced at my message inbox, and sure enough, the very first new message was titled 'Pussy'. "Fuck you too. Assholes."

Angel gave me a weak smile. "How about we head back out into the jungle and uhh... find another t-rex?"

"Let's do that." I ruffled my shoulders. "Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky, and find one that breathes fire.”