Well, pretend to pretend. Safety was just too big of a lie for me to buy, no matter how hard I tried to sell it.

In the end, the climb took more than three hours. Three hours of a pain in my ass, but only a few hours nonetheless. A dull ache spread throughout my muscles, but nothing like the intense burn I should have been getting after that long climbing. Hells, with a couple of quick breaks in the middle and the growing shade as I approached the next cluster of jungle I barely even felt the pain!

As I crossed the last few hundred feet I entered the edge of the waterfall. It was broken up here, little trickles running through the craggy bark. They were too small and sparse to have gotten a good look at these before I’d set out, but luckily that also meant none were too large to reach across and get a grip on the other side.

Still, moving across them was a pain. Reaching the other side wasn’t the same as securing a grip there and while overextending myself I slipped and drove my face into the flow. I lurched back sputtering and shook the water out of my eyes. Dammit. That could have been lethal in a stronger current.

I took the time to search out narrower crossings after that.

Things went smoothly, embarrassing slip ups aside, and I was safe (er) within the confines of the bizarre horizontal jungle again.

Life chirped and squawked all around me, including the worst kind.

I waved a hand through the cloud of no see ums and mosquitoes buzzing about me. Why did I have to lose my protective layer of mud?!

Plop

I tensed and stared down the bulging eyes of the frog that had landed on the next branch over. Nictitating membranes flashed across them as it stared me down in turn. What did it want? Something barely half a meter around couldn’t hope to eat me right? Shit did frogs have to swallow their food whole or not?

It’s jaw twitched in one last adjustment and I ducked just in time. I bent backward to pivot my ears down and out of the way, tongue flashing just above my eyes. The globby end contracted as it flashed above me, squeezing out a spray of smaller tendrils.

I caught myself in an unbalanced crab-walk pose to stop myself from falling off as the frog tongue shot past me. The smaller tendrils played out the same motion in miniature, spinning around the central glob.

The spread of tendrils shot through the cloud of flies like a fireball through ranks of soldiers, claiming the life of every bug in its way before the elastic appendage hit its limit and snapped back to the open mouth waiting for it.

The frog happily caught it’s returning tongue and the thick blob of flies attached to it. The muscles in its jaw flexed, slowly working away at the trapped insects. I could hear the soft rustling crunch of snapped wings and crushed chitin even from here.

I let out a breath and relaxed.

My claws slipped as I did so and I frantically scrabbled my way back to a stable position. Stars dammit, I needed to remember to keep my guard up.

I eyed the frog as it shot its net-tongue through the flies for the second time. At least not everything was aiming to eat me. It might be just one frog, but the reminder that not every species driven to fantastic sizes by dungeon mana went mad with hunger.

The frog collected a third tongueful of food.

Well, not mad with hunger for humanoid flesh specifically. The bugs could fuck off.

And fuck off they did. Somewhere in their infinitesimal brains they began to recognize the dangers of hanging out with a hungry frog and began to leave. The frog promptly turned its colorful back on me and hopped off to follow them.

Made some impressive distance too. Maybe one day I’d be able to jump like that.

But not today. Today I made far humbler hops, forced to rely on the offshoots to move between main branches. Still, the easier handholds made it far faster than scaling the trunk directly, and the short sightlines eliminated the worst of the nerve-wracking exposure.

Short sightlines worked both ways though, and not everything in the canopy was hungry for insects alone. I kept [Beggar’s Disregard] running strong and [Rag Armor] on the tip of my tongue.

I moved upwards, belatedly remembering to cancel out the biochemical adjustments I’d made to my hands. The body was a complex machine, and I wasn’t arrogant enough to think my crude changes were truly better than how I’d been born. I wasn’t nearly good enough to craft a overall better system. Not yet.

There was no night here, no sleepiness, only the relentless weariness beating down on you until you had no choice but to rest. Everything had limits, and I was pushing up against mine.

I could make another few hundred feet… No, I shook off the self-destructive impulse. A tired body was a weak body, and more importantly, the same applied to the mind. I couldn’t afford to dull my reflexes, they were the only edge I had.

I sighed and started looking for a place to lay low for a few hours. And it would be only a few hours, however weary I might be, I was still working on a time limit. A short catnap would suffice, and reduce the time I’d spend vulnerable too.

Still, there was no reason to go haring off in the wrong direction to rest. I’d keep climbing until I spotted a promising nook.

The promising nook failed to present itself, but it wasn’t long until I noticed a nice flat area. A cluster of loose plant matter had fallen across a fork in the branches to form a natural nest. It was far more exposed than I would have liked, but the weave of the branches was loose enough that a squirmy enough creature could wriggle in between them and be entirely covered.

I huffed and kept climbing. I tossed a few glances back as I got higher and they only confirmed my suspicions.

The branches shifted unnaturally with my perspective, lining up with the world around it almost, but not quite, perfectly. It formed a faint edge between the nest and the outside world. An edge that formed a sort of ruffled, almost feathery pattern.

I had to hold myself back despite my tiredness as I made distance between me and the chameleon-owl nest. Speed would do me no favors. Haste made mistakes, and mistakes I could ill afford.

That did mean I’d need to press on (up?) for a bit longer though. There was no way in the hells that I was going to sleep anywhere near one of those.

I was more than a little pissed off by the time I found an acceptable fork to wedge myself into. Stupid bloody bird, existing. Stupid damn brain, not letting me feel safe enough for sleep anywhere near a predator. They didn’t even hunt up here, I knew that.

But that didn’t mean I’d get any sleep inside a hundred feet of one.

In the end my paranoia did little more than guarantee I was even more tired by the time I found a promising knot in the wood, but the nagging voice in the back of my head told me I’d been saved from certain death-by-owl and I knew my paranoia wasn’t going anywhere.

I curled up in the hollow bit of wood and promptly climbed out again. I stripped off my bark shell and carefully pulled it over my hollow as a lid.

“Sorry brain.” I muttered myself to sleep. “You don’t deserve my shit, you know I’m just whining…”

I woke with a sniffle, beating back the urge to spread my arms and yawn. I tensed my muscles in the best imitation of a stretch I could do without moving as I swiveled my ears about to catch any lurking sounds.

Nothing.

I sighed and sat up, glancing around for visual confirmation before I let myself stretch properly.

Warm-up was critically important for any athletic activity, and besides, I could use the moment to double-check my biochemistry. Sure enough, the brief changes I’d made yesterday had fade out without any lasting changes, at least as far as I could tell. That was fine by me. Some indiscernible difference could sneak up on me and make my heart explode, but worrying about that was beyond pointless; it was actively harmful.

Mom had once told me that not only was stress unpleasant, it could hurt you on an all too real physical level. I’d rarely known her to be wrong, but I questioned the wisdom of sharing that fact. It was an ironically stressful bit of knowledge that was difficult to handle well. I generally just tried not to think about it, lest I be doomed to an eternal feedback loop.

I shook my head and found something to distract myself: my second crack at Kimakt’s conscious bodily control. Everything I’d done so far was small beans in comparison to the tricks Kimakt had demonstrated, but taking it slow had its advantages.

Like decreased odds of heart-splosions. I might want to avoid stressing out over the risk, but that didn’t mean I was ignoring it. That would be a whole nother kind of stupid.

Still, while simple in comparison to the really flashy stuff what I was about to try was still a notable step up. It certainly wouldn’t be as easy to undo.

I was going to fuck with my blood, and that started with the bones. Yeah, not what one would expect, but Mom had taught me that blood was created in the bones and Kimakt’s training had only backed that up. I was aiming for a very specific kind of fuckery here, and it wouldn’t do to get the wrong kind.

There was probably some way of boosting blood aside from making more of it, but that sounded complicated, and I didn’t have time for complicated. Making more blood would have profound effects, at least if I pulled it off properly.

You see, I had something of an advanced education compared to the average goblin, and that meant I knew that blood was composed of three distinct things. Or was it four?

Fuck. I racked my brain, searching for the vital information. I… think it depended on how you counted it? Regardless, red blood was definitely one of them, so the other kinds didn’t really mean much, did they?

As one might guess, red blood was the most important kind. It, fascinatingly enough, helped with breathing. Mom had been full of that kind of knowledge, little ways the body interconnected parts of itself that you’d never have guessed.

It was those interconnected things that I was counting on. After all, one of those ways was the reason that I had a limited amount of red blood to begin with. The body simply couldn’t handle much more.

But my body wasn’t normal, was it? I had Stats. I’d boost my red blood count, and my Toughness and Constitution would bear out the difference.