—Sally—

  Getting flung to the floor was painful, but thankfully I didn't nd badly, and I only felt bruised instead of anything more serious.

  New injury!Health: 4/4 -> 3/4

  When Orion decked whatever trick he was trying to pull off, I was thrown off to the side. I hit the floor and rolled until I smmed into one of the stone walls of the house. It took a few seconds for me to gather my scattered thoughts, at least enough to assess what the fuck just happened.

  I looked around, and realised—after far too long—that I was upside down, and more importantly, on the outside of the building. Presumably also outside the [Checkpoint]'s protection.

  I quickly righted myself, and almost started running towards the—recently—knocked down and shattered stone door, but I saw Ulun'suti's head lurking directly in front of my route to safety.

  I froze before I could draw attention to myself, but I don't think that anything that I could've done would've taken its attention away from Orion's prone body. Its eye was affixed to him, never gncing away as he slowly moved himself upright.

  I hesitantly shuffled closer, and got a better view of the Ranger. He was floundering on his back—presumably from a concussion, judging from the blood that coated his face and a nasty cut between the eyebrows. Then I watched him accidentally looked towards the giant serpent, and become instantly entranced.

  What an absolute moron. How do you accidentally stare into the medusa-adjacent ray more than once?

  "No fun when they trip! Ruins the chase." It petuntly moaned, while it seemed upset at Orion's failure to run, it wasn't going to turn down a free meal. I was tempted to let him fix his own mess, as he was inside the house. The only way the snake could reach him was if he walked out of his own volition, but there was no point in risking it. As much as I wanted to be petty, there was no point in risking my assets on something I could get revenge for ter.

  Before the snake could remember my existence again, I rushed past it and through the [Checkpoint]'s door. Its eye flickered to me as I jumped onto Orion's immobile body, and I felt a bit of amusement at seeing him lying on the shattered remains of the door.

  [Congratutions! You have reached the [Checkpoint]: Home of The Thunderbird's Bride.]

  [Forbidden entities cannot enter checkpoints, which includes the factions: Monsters, Moon Cultists, unintelligent beasts, Chaos aligned Spirits…]

  "You! Little Lizard!" It scowled, incensed at my arrival. Before Orion could do something stupid—like crawl towards the snake—I pnted my front two talons on the man's jaw and spread my wings, cutting the snake's gem off from his line of sight. It worked much faster than st time, and it only took a second for the ranger to return to full consciousness as the shadow of my wings covered his eyes.

  Before either of us could move, the water between us and the snake erupted, a bullet of brown flesh rocketing towards me with an impossible amount of speed for something that rge.

  The horned serpent smmed into the checkpoint’s barrier, and I—elegantly—dodged by falling backwards, nding on Orion's face. The snake’s fangs scratched the immaterial barrier, turning the barrier's popping into a continuous series of miniature explosions. I didn’t dare move any more as I watched the giant snake try harder to pierce through the magic with raw force. The snapping of fire had become so fast that it looked like a supernova.

  As the barrier started to morph into a yer of psma, the snake backed off before anything bad could happen, and it gave me the stink eye as it retreated. At least it took a bit of damage from its stunt, while its scales were completely untouched and undamaged from the fmes, the gums around its two pairs of fangs were raw and dripping bck blood.

  “Ow! Ow-wie!” The Horned Serpent huffed to itself, like it’d just sipped a coffee that was a bit too hot.

  Though my attention was taken away from it when its blood started to dissolve the stone it nded on with a loud sizzling.

  I watched in abject horror as the blood cartoonishly melted through the stone in seconds, sinking through it like drops of magma flicked onto and melting through styrofoam.

  But to make matters even worse, a dozen of the droplets of the dark liquid nearest to me slid towards the barrier, instead of obeying gravity.

  Somehow—as I took a closer look at the blood—it got even shittier. I could see miniature shapes forming in the blood as it—rather than roll or flow like a liquid should—crawled along the ground, cws, talons and animalistic features reaching out of it to pull the blood along. It was like a zoo of shrunken, rabid animals had been trapped in its blood, and were desperately cwing at the bubble-like walls of the blood to get out.

  But thankfully the [Checkpoint] barrier blocked their progress like it did with the snake, fshing to life to incinerate the ten or so droplets with terrifying intensity. It was like a bug zapper infused with the power of the sun.

  But... It seemed to be struggling against the animated blood, at least compared to the effort it put into stopping the serpent. Somehow it struggled less with the source of ichor than where came from.

  I finally backed up and moved away from the barrier as it turned up the intensity, the zapping going past what it did to stop the snake and becoming one continuous stream of pure white light and noise. As its intensity flew past bug zapper and encroached the full unadulterated power of the sun, the shapes in the blood grew rger and more erratic. The unholy forms cwed at the barrier with a desperation that you wouldn’t see in anything sane or natural.

  The blood seemed to be more persistent than the snake, maybe even more powerful, enough for me to be curious enough to use [Appraisal] on it.

  [Using [Appraisal – Lvl 1] on: Unidentified Blood]

  [No entry found, coalescing information on: Unidentified Blood]

  [.] [..] [...]

  [Entry Generated!]

  [The Bck Blood – Level ??? material

  [Poison potent enough to erode the ws of reality]

  [The cursed creature had all the poisons in existence funnelled into it, its blood carrying a concoction made to unravel the powers of divinity and any other esoteric magic. The consequences of coming in physical contact with the liquid are as varied as the danger of it, with any variety of disease catchable from it.]

  [Warning! High threat detected: Metaphysical deterioration]

  [Automatically filing report with admin for clean up.]

  [Estimated wait time for response:]

  [.][..][…]

  [∞]

  That’s scary, especially given that the only thing between me and the hungry snake was a barrier. An enchantment that the blood apparently specialises in ‘unravelling’. I wondered if I could get a bit more info on the [Metaphysical deterioration], just to see how bad it is.

  [Using [Appraisal – Lvl 1] on: Metaphysical deterioration]

  [Metaphysical deterioration – Level ??? Threat]

  [Threat to all yers of your being, avoid at all costs.]

  [Metaphysical deterioration is a threat category for a type of damage that will undo your spiritual existence. This threat is equal to all manner of existences and magics.]

  [If you’re exposed to even a minute amount of metaphysical deterioration, your soul and mind will be too damaged to recover. There will be no recovery, or afterlife to escape to.]

  [You Will Be Purged By The Sun]

  Okay, so it could get worse, that’s just fucking fantastic.

  Before I could get too panicked about the magical equivalent of nuclear waste, the agitated blood chimeras finally started boiling, foul smelling wisps of smoke emanating off of them. Then the ten aberrations started exploding with sharp pops into nothingness, with no sign of their existence remaining apart from the scorch marks and melted trails they made in the stone floor.

  “You reek of des-picable familiarity.” The Ulun’suti suddenly whispered in a serious, and abnormally sane tone for it, my head whipping up towards it to see it staring at me with crity in its eye.

  “You smell of the Uktena, of another great snake.” It whispered again, the gem on its forehead fshing as if an invisible beam of light had reflected off of it for a moment.

  It frowned, and then leaned closer, its good eye stopping centimetres before the invisible barrier. For a few seconds it just stayed there, staring.

  “Why don’t you let a cousin of… one of your grandparents in, hmm?” The snake all of a sudden asked jokingly, childishly, like it was talking to a baby, the insanity in its tone returning. Which I suppose I am from its perspective, but does it know that I can understand it?

  “I know that you can hear me.” It huffed, its tone suddenly even and almost normal, but it had an anger to it, like an adult disciplining a naughty toddler.

  I slowly backed away from it, moving away from the doorway with a feigned casualness, that didn’t really stop me from shivering under the snake’s gaze. As I slowly walked off of Orion's chest, the ranger finally gained awareness of his surroundings and turned away from the snake's gem.

  “Don’t be naughty! Let me in!” The snake’s tone switched again, back to the petunt, confused intonation of senile retiree. It opened its mouth again, hissing loudly as its head reared back again, as if it was about to strike again.

  But before it could try to strike again, Orion snatched me up and slid out of the doorway. For a few seconds he sat behind the flimsy stone wall, and I was scared enough of the threat outside to not compin.

  "Next time little blood." The Horned Serpent whispered, before a spsh outside signalled its retreat, and I rexed.

  With the threat gone for now, I left Orion's grip as quickly as I could, jumping to the floor so I could investigate the surroundings. Much to my disappointment, this [Checkpoint] seemed to be a dud, with none of the items around the room unpetrified. And even those were boring, no cool skeletons, just a twenty centimetre sb in the corner that might've been a bed at some point, and a table.

  With an angry grunt—the fact that it sounded cute to my ears only made me more annoyed—and sat down in the furthest corner I could from Orion.

  I already could start to feel the cold seep into me from the stone floor, joining the rising hunger pangs in my stomach to make a miserable experience even worse. But even if it fucking hurt me, I was willing to tough it out, just to avoid ending up getting picked up and cared for again. I was better than that.

  ***

  New Status Effect!HypothermiaNew Status Effect!Starvation (Stage 1) -> Starvation (Stage 2)

  New injury!Health: 3/4 -> 2/4

  It took a while for my brain to collect itself enough to realise where I was, the cold having turned the st hour—maybe even longer, I couldn't tell—into a blur. But it didn't take very long to figure out where I was.

  Yet again I found myself in Orion’s hands, but for a reason that I found gross, I decided not to do anything about it this time. I id cupped on his hand, leaned against his chest, with both of his calloused palms around me.

  I was pleasantly absorbing his heat, and his fingers were consistently rubbing the line of scales along my back. Despite hating being in his care as much as before, I didn’t make a move to stop him.

  I did try to avoid it ending up like this again, I really did. But it turns out that no matter how much you will yourself to not feel cold or hungry, it really doesn’t magically make you able to overcome it through willpower. Yet another thing that isn’t like how it was portrayed in media.

  Orion has used his skill [Self-Healing] on you!Health: 2/4 -> 4/4

  I ignored the continuous System notifications as I rationalised that—because no fault of my own—Orion had ended up taking care of me. Again.

  It still felt humiliating, being forced to rely on a stranger for survival doesn’t get easier the more it happens, but the… massaging of my back is a nice touch. It makes me feel less like a bed-bound patient getting their bedpan changed, and more like a king or queen receiving a massage from a servant. A much more tolerable version of events.

  I suppose that I’ve just got to deal with it for now, and beg that Orion doesn’t ask me about it when I figure out a way to communicate with him. I’d rather die than have to have a conversation about this.

  I’d much rather think about Ulun’suti’s comments on the potential race of one of my grandparents. I don’t know who the parents of my dragon parents were, but it seemed that they got a bit freaky with a close retive of the giant snake.

  It only really occurred to me how important that off-hand comment was after I took a few minutes to internally dissect the statement. A descendant of an Uktena—which has to be a species of giant snake—should also be something at least serpent adjacent. Which means that one of my new blood grandparents was a snake, a step up from my original ones already. Mine consisted of a pair of absent ones that went missing in the nineties, and the other couple were extremely eccentric. They tried to get me to do all sorts of nonsensical ‘training’ when I was a kid, some of it bad enough that my parents cut them off for a couple years, until I was smart enough not to follow along with whatever they suggested.

  Though I’m a bit confused about how it wasn’t more noticeable, I would’ve assumed that it would cause some sort of physical mutation in one of my new parents. But I suppose that if there wasn’t any sort of visible inheritance, it may be less literal than that. I mean it doesn’t make sense—without considering magic—that anything even vaguely reted to a snake should be able to have children with a dragon either.

  So this world must have more of an Asgardian myth’s ws of biology, anybody and anything able to make all sorts of mixed kids with anything that so much as twitched in their direction. I’ve read enough myths about Loki to know that much, most of his famous kids didn’t qualify as human in the slightest, and neither did their other parent.

  But the real question is whether I’ll get poison blood when I grow up, or if I get busted snake magic. Because if there’s one thing I know from my—admittedly second-hand—experience with this stuff, is that having a blood retive with magical significance tends to come with a magical inheritance from them. Be that a skill or an aptitude in their area of expertise.

  But—by the look of my broken, shitty system—I’m going to have to fix it first before I could get any of the cool stuff.

  I opened it up again, just to see if anything had changed in the st few days of chaos.

  Nope, still pay-walling me. Maybe when it gets fixed, I'll get those snake powers. Ooh! They could be magic spells that I could use! Serpent magic!

  With the question of my heritage answered as well as it could be for now, I let myself passively enjoy the massage while I could still get away with it.

  ***

  “Sally.” Orion called out suddenly, his abrupt and loud voice calling out my name made me wake up from the most rexing nap I’d had in a while. I’d forgotten that there was one word of his nguage that I could understand.

  I twisted my head up towards him, hoping that the sooner that I pay attention to him, the sooner I can get back to sleeping. But the Ranger didn’t do anything immediately, he just stared at me with that standard, and extremely neutral expression of his. If I hadn't been forced to spend the st few days with him, I would've assumed that it was an angry, or annoyed face, but I'd learnt that was just its his resting bitch face.

  With a deep breath he seemed to come to some sort of decision, and raised a hand next to him.

  “Sally, ooky.” He spoke with the same sort of tone a local would use with someone who they’d assumed doesn’t speak their nguage—like a tourist. Their words slow, pronounced condescendingly, and with barely hidden barbs aimed at your nationality.

  It took a few seconds and him repeating the sentence before I realised that he wanted me to look at his hand, and I did.

  “Oodgay irlgay.” he said with a… maybe a slightly satisfied expression, and he lowered his hand onto my back as he went back into thought. I gave my head a little shake at the strangeness of his actions, my neckce making a nice clinking noise as the stone pendant bounced off of my scales.

  After a minute of awkward staring, he pointed at the other side of the stony room, and I followed it to see nothing but rock.

  “Sally, ooky.” he intoned, and I followed his finger to the new pce he was pointing while feeling immensely perplexed. Hoping that he’d be finished with whatever experiment he was conducting so that I just be left alone.

  But instead of doing something tolerable after he stopped pointing at random objects, he reached towards my head, immediately eliciting a growl out of me.

  “Sally, arkbay!” He happily responded with obviously exaggerated excitement, his hand instantly stopping moving towards my head and instead returning to my back. He let out a small smile as he gave me what I could only call a pat on the back for a job well done. But he stopped after only a couple of seconds, taking his hand away before it could really serve its purpose for being there. The small smidgen of warmth I'd gotten from it fading instantly.

  As he did so, a sneaking suspicion about his actions began to bloom in my mind, an idea so foul that I might just have to leave Orion to die here by himself the first chance I get.

  “Sally, arkbay!” He said again, and when I did nothing, he reached for my head again. He only stopped when I let out a warning snarl, and finally returned his hand to my back again, but only for a little bit before he took it away just as quickly. It felt like he was trying to reward me for it, which could only mean… But surely he wouldn’t?

  “Sally, arkbay?” He asked, and to confirm what I already knew but was unwilling to accept, I let out a hesitant noise. It was a weird awkward squeak that reminded me of someone trying to get the attention of their boss who’s already in a conversation with someone else. It was probably the by-product of never having wilfully made a noise on purpose before, all of my ‘speaking’ I’d done so far was just my body doing what it wanted.

  As soon as the squeak left my mouth, Orion let out a happy noise, and his hand returned to its spot usual spot.

  Shit, he’s fucking trying to train me, that word he’s been repeating gaining new meaning when paired with his actions.

  Bark.

  He’s training me to bark.

  “Sally, arkbay.” Orion commanded, my brain getting a weird itchy feeling for a moment before my brain unravelled the meaning behind the sound, like an optical illusion finally clicking and revealing an object so obvious you sp yourself for not noticing it earlier.

  “Sally, bark.” He repeated, and in my state of confusion I accidentality responded, and again, he gave me ‘positive reinforcement’. I bet that if there was food down here, he’d be giving me pieces of meat instead.

  “Oodgay irlgay!” He happily said, this time his happiness sounded unforced and genuine as he gave me what I assumed was some sort of praise.

  With a snarl I leapt out of his reach, finding the forgotten humiliation returning in full force, compounding with the shame of falling for the most basic animal tamer’s tricks. Shit, I really ate it all up, all it took was a few back rubs and nice words for me to follow his commands without even realising it. I had to be fucking stupid to fall for this.

  He tried to reach for me again, to which I snarled and instinctively spread my wings out in anger, Orion flinching back in a way that almost made me feel bad. But he expended the limited goodwill he’d earned the moment he treated me like a wild animal.

  As his hand hovered there a moment too long, my teeth lunged forwards, raking across his fingers and creating bloody red furrows. My wounded pride was screaming, and drowned out any hint of sympathy I could have for him. Even if it looked like he was in more pain from my rejection then my bite.

  “Atwhay appenedhay?” He muttered to himself as he gave up trying to reach for me. His face formed a frown, showing a rare change in the man’s static, and annoyingly handsome features.

  I ignored his silent pleas and quickly scampered over to the other side of the room and curled up as tightly as I could, hoping to preserve my remaining heat for as long as possible. Logically I knew that there wasn’t exactly an alternative to the inevitable conclusion of Orion having to impart some of his body heat to me again.

  But I didn’t have room for logic in my brain right now, my pride demanding that I do something to right this wrong. The anger I felt because of his actions almost drowned out my lingering concerns about how much of my internal monologue is slowly becoming corrupted. A concern quickly arose as I realised how casual I’ve become about the contact between us.

  I mean seriously, how has my life changed so much that I’m seriously having to worry about getting trained by the person I’m stuck with. And who has to seriously worry about needing body heat from their companion? The sm—Books!

  The normal novels I've stumbled across had nothing on the way my life was currently going. And that's fucking saying something.

  Maybe if I did some sort of psychological warfare back, like try to train him into-

  Nope. That… That wasn't right. Feelings of internalised cringe—and some other sensation I wasn't familiar with—was followed by the certainty that it'd make the whole situation worse. I’m not going to think about it anymore, I won't subject myself to the slow identity death of even entertaining the idea. Feels too weird to even consider.

  I huffed in annoyance and snuck a gnce at Orion—I felt that desperate for a distraction. He wasn’t doing much better than I was it seemed, staring bnkly at the wall in frustration, and I found myself surprised by how easily I’d been able to read him recently. It seemed that I’d developed something of an intuition when it came to diagnosing his mental state from his ft face. A day ago I could only tell you if he was making an attempt to smile or not. Though even now he wasn’t exactly an open book to me.

  But my newfound ability to dissect his emotions did remind me that I understood a word of his, and not the name that was magically impnted in my head. It hadn’t been a normal way of learning a word in another nguage either, definitely not my usual method of memorising a sound and reting it to the closest English equivalent I had. Learning a few words of another nguage for travelling hadn’t ever been that easy for me.

  It was something that just ‘made sense’, my brain automatically understanding and comprehending the context of how its used in a sentence and its poetic potential as well. The words meaning simir to—but not identical—to my English definition.

  The process of the word popping into my nguage centre fully formed felt like a magically induced sense of deja vu mixed with only the mildest of logical deductions. It made it hard not to wonder what exactly allowed me to do this, where this unnatural ability had come from.

  It had to be the system, right? Nothing else I’ve seen so far had the potential of this, and it’d be within its normal prerogatives to help someone learn a nguage.

  To test if the system really had the abilities duo-lingo wished it even had a smidgin of, I began to think about the instruction Orion gave me before his ‘bark’ one.

  The word he used was… ooky? And it was used whenever he raised his hand and if he pointed at something, maybe he was trying to get my attention on something? So… Maybe its means ‘Attention’? No that feels wrong.

  It’d make more sense if it was ‘Look here’. ‘Look’! Ooky means look!

  Just like before, my head seemed to conjure a definition and meaning for the word before I could even reconsider my answer. Interestingly it seemed to make wrong answers feel obvious, awkward, and out of pce, making it very easy to feel confident about my answers.

  Whatever it is, the sooner I can communicate with Orion, the earlier I can avoid situations that make me feel like an unconsenting, uninterested lead character forced into a horny YA novel.

  I did try to understand some of the other words that he’d said today, but unfortunately I cked the context to understand why he said anything. Though it was a good test of the limits of the auto-transtor I’d been given, I still had to put in at least the first step to understanding it before I can get the artificial understanding injected into my frontal lobe.