When I was running around the backyard with the twins from next door, Aiden and Lizzie, I don’t think anyone ever picked up a stick and pretended it was a spear. It’s always a sword, because swords are inherently cooler. They also have a large striking surface, which gives you a huge margin of error on each swing. Spears have to be accurate, period. I know my skills have improved tremendously from the first fumbled fight with a satyr that nearly killed me. I assume I will eventually be able to spear the pimento from an olive.

  So, when I tell you that I reflexively extended the stake into spear form and it went right through the giant snake’s eye, believe me, it was a massive dose of luck. I hadn’t even gotten to the point of figuring where the thing had a head. The sound it made was not the sound of a snake. Snakes hiss, but this thing let out a screeching noise like tires on asphalt. It thrashed away, almost yanking my spear from my hands, but I tugged and it came out. I was expecting a squishy sound effect to go along with it, but it simply came out of his eye.

  This eye was as big as my fist, in a dark brown head that was larger than the table in my dorm. The body was almost as thick as my waist. I might have passed a hundred smaller snakes along the way in the rough walled parts of the labyrinth, mistaking them for roots.

  My stab into the roof of its mouth was not luck. I’m not sure how tough those dull brown scales are, but it seems like targeting a pink, squishy zone should always be the way to go. Being a snake, it’s quite flexible and reared to absorb the damage from the strike, bloodying the roof of its mouth, but not lodging in or causing major damage.

  I switch my hand position to what would be overhand if I was throwing, the point coming from the bottom of my fist, and I spin. The eviscerating head of the spear disappears under brown scale and nearly black blood.

  The monster spasms and writhes, trying to dislodge the spear. I twist the spear, so the head rotates inside, shredding whatever I hit. The hiss it makes next is more like the air being let out from a tire, not the attack cry of a snake. The body goes limp. I now see that it’s woven into the soft dirt of the wall like a giant worm. A very fangy worm. I pull the spear and it starts to uncoil from the camouflage of the wall and falls to the floor.

  “Look out,” Sadie says in a tiny voice, like she’s imitating a toddler. She points. “Snake.”

  “You fell through the floor, too?” I ask as she and Baco bound up the hall, and I wipe the spearhead on what’s left of my pants.

  “We were looking for a way to pull you back up to where we were. The floor started shifting and pretty soon, it all started collapsing, super slow.”

  I look past her. The hall goes dark after a few meters, no patterns of brain fungi or crystal moss. I’m probably looking at a mound of dirt in the dark where the passage collapsed.

  “That was kind of impressive,” she says, kneeling by the snake body. “You move like a trained warrior now.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “Without all that hassle of getting trained,” I said.

  “You think fighting sirens, lamia, bats, boars, crawlers and satyrs is somehow not training?”

  “I just thought there would be some amazing powerful and wise trainer to guide me along.”

  She puts her hands on her hips and glares.

  “So,” I break the suddenly heavy silence. “How about that food?”

  She pokes the snake. “In my enclave, I remember snake and turtle stew.”

  “You cook, I’ll make sure we have a secure perimeter down here and good sight lines to see any oncoming traffic.”

  I once had gator bites at a Cajun restaurant. It might be the origin of the phrase ‘tastes like chicken’. Trying to get a decent amount of meat from a regular snake would be difficult. This thing is huge enough for an easy dinner for three.

  Sadie starts a fire while I curse how many ribs snakes have. I collect a fair amount of pale white meat, which gets skewered on easily found sticks.

  Tastes like chicken.

  Hopefully, we find a decent supply of salt, pepper, paprika and oregano soon. And a shirt. Chewing the charred snake has me leaning toward the salt being more important than the shirt. Baco does not seem to mind the lack of seasoning, but I’m not sure war boars are known for their distinguished palette. I’ve seen him chomp down a fair supply of slugs and quickly scratched them off the list of available food.

  “Let’s get kraken,” I say, standing and stowing the stake in my belt loop. If we had that salt, we might have been able to make snake jerky.

  Sadie scratched the wide bristly top of Baco’s head and nods.

  The dirt maze is only slightly different from every other type of maze we’ve been in. The intersections tend to be more Y shaped than T, and the halls are nothing near straight. The brain ball fungus is the main source of light, which is slightly orange, as opposed to crystal moss blue. Now that I’m aware of it, every now and then the dirt of the walls shift and pebbles fall away as I catch a glimpse of far smaller snakes burrowing into safety.

  Your Perception skill is now (Emerging, Level 5).

  I move the notification out of my sight. It’s too dim down here to let part of my vision be obscured. Especially when something is happening to the passage. Looks like the more I use a skill, the longer between each skill up.

  The world slows down and goes high definition. Every pebble is clear, every bump on the wall obvious. The crumbles of dirt coming from the ceiling don’t fall as fast as they should. My movement is slower. Everything has gone onto molasses, a sort of drippy feeling stasis. Maybe every five levels of a skill gives you some cool new effect. Level 5 Perception might make me perceive time more slowly so that I get a better chance to react. Dark carved stone pushes from the ceiling, the floor and each wall in front of me, like automatic doors that only go out a foot or so. There’s now a stone frame filling the hallway.

  Whatever it is, it triggered this new weird perception skill, which means it absolutely cannot be a good thing. Black sparks of lightning flicker from one side to the other when the entire frame fills with a churning mist.

  I turn, but it takes forever. That portal doesn’t seem slowed at all, or it’s flickering black lightning bolts a few times a second in real time. I want to run to get some distance between me and the cursed feeling portal, but if that lightning comes toward us, we’re toast. I see Sadie, barely moving, starting to recognize the danger beyond me. I’m sure, I don’t know how or why, but I’m absolutely sure that those lightning strikes will kill me in a most horrible manner.

  I look to Baco. Spirit moves faster than flesh. This is another fact that I simply know now. Like dodging a ball thrown at my head, I know what I have to do, without thinking. I will myself out of my body and into his.