Please select from the following six options:
- Hardened Scales
- Poison Glands
- Increase Mass
- Hunter’s Gaze
- Bifurcated Tail
- Mind Fortress
“Well, that’s not very bloody helpful,” I grumbled, rubbing my belly against my gold. I was splayed out on my hoard, idly rolling a single coin back and forth with my right foreclaw.
“No information beyond the names, right?” Kat was perched on my left arm, swinging her tiny legs back and forth. If I were still a mammal, the sight of her relatively long, pale limbs might have stirred something in me. Then again, she was eight inches tall, and I wasn’t that freaky on Earth. The tiny woman was still disturbingly attractive, though.
I nodded and laid my chin down on the edge of the pile of treasure. The feeling of the shiny, precious metal calmed my nerves.
“What did you get? This is what I’m here for, you lizard-brained dolt!” she snapped after a moment’s silence.
I explained the options that the system had given me.
“Oh wow, you got shafted!” The tiny woman cackled until I snorted and blew her off my arm. She rose to her feet and scowled at me for a second before her face softened.
“Don’t do that again! Look, I forgot that your world was a magical desert. You’re like the worst neophyte young master from Klandeque. All powerful family and perceived strength, but no bloody idea what you’re doing! OK. Some of the choices are pretty obvious, right?” I nodded. Increased mass was pretty straightforward. The tiny woman leapt over my arm and slapped the end of my snout with her sword.
“No, they aren’t, you imbecile! Some of them you’ll see again, over and over. Increase Mass will make you bigger and heavier. About ten percent larger each time you take it. That’s how you go from being a baby, toothless little beast, to one of the empire-burning Titans of the Skies. Seriously, if those guys ever reach out to you, you should accept and join their silly little guild. No one messes with the TOTS.” I filed that tidbit away in the back of my mind and glared at my ‘guide’.
“So you think I should take that one?” I asked icily. She caught my tone and smirked at me.
“Nah. Not yet. Of your first choices… I reckon it’s a toss-up.”
“That’s not very helpful, Kat.”
“Poison glands give you a venomous bite. It will scale as you grow and get more deadly, making it a good early choice. Mind fortress, you don’t need to worry about that for now. That’s a late game mod. Hunter's Gaze and Bifurcated Tail are the gems for you right now.”
“Game?” Talking to Kat was like pulling teeth sometimes.
“Yeah, game and I’m your key to effective min-maxing, kiddo. I’m your best and only friend.”
“I’ve had better friends than you,” I muttered. That was a lie, and judging by the smirk she gave me, I gathered she knew it. “I can guess what the tail one does. What’s Hunter’s Gaze?” I asked with a sigh.
“Yeah, you were a regular social dynamo back on Earth, big guy. Hunter’s Gaze will enhance your vision and give you a mesmerising glare. The weak-willed will be hypnotised, fall to your feet in worship, or shit themselves and run away. More formidable foes will be stunned for a second or two. If you’d have gotten access to your nasal glands, I’d have recommended taking them, but Gaze is a nice compromise. It’s kind of a ranged attack and will make clearing the tunnels a lot easier.” She shrugged. “It’s your choice, though, outer disciple.”
“Outer what? Look, can we stop with the slurs? Otherwise I’m going to start calling you Slutty Tinkerbell. How about a truce?” I offered. Kat glared at me but nodded reluctantly.
“Sure, I like a man who knows when he’s beat. So what do you think? Gaze or a double tail?” she asked, hopping back up onto my left arm.
I curled my tail up over my body and examined it. Flexible, strong, covered in black scales and ending in a vicious-looking point, I could see the advantages of having an extra one. The thing reacted on its own to stabilise me in flight and increase my agility when I was on the ground, much like a cat’s would. I could see it slapping baddies and spearing my unworthy foes in a fight, as well.
“What am I going to be up against in the dungeon? A couple of those bunnies tried to kick my guts out!”
“Oh, you were punching down; they just got lucky.”
“You think that was lucky?” I exclaimed as I cradled my bruised midriff.
“Sorry, Bob, but I won’t know what we’re facing until you spend the coins to open the first floor. It won’t be too hard, the system will generally scale things to your strength when it comes to dungeon expansion, but the system could pick from thousands of possible species to infest the place.”
“And I’ll have to kill them all?” Despite the reptilian coldness that suffused my mind, the thought of slaughter made me a little uncomfortable. I thought back to how I acted after I’d killed the bunnies, cracking my jaws and swallowing the cute little bastards whole. I figured I’d be OK once I got started, but looking at it from the outside, I just wanted to snooze on my bed of shiny coins, not kill things.
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“Nah, you massive, er, dragon. Truce, OK, you can do this, Kat,” she muttered to herself. “Sometimes it will just be the floor boss you need to beat, but getting to those pricks will be the trick. I’ll be able to help guide you, though. Your ever-faithful Slutty Tinkerbell!”
“I’m not really a fighter,” I began, but she snorted and lay down on my scales, propping her chin on her fist and swinging her legs up so she lay like a tiny Bond Girl in a metal bikini on my forearm.
“You’re a fighter, or the W.O.O. wouldn’t have picked you for this experiment,” she said, twirling her hair with the fingers of her free hand. I decided to come back to whatever-the-hell that meant later.
I closed my eyes for a moment. The letters still hung in my vision, even with both sets of eyelids shut. I clicked on Hunter’s Gaze and braced myself. I was expecting bolts of pain to flash through my eyes, or mind-melting agony to batter at my skull.
None of that happened, and when I heard Kat chuckling to herself, I risked opening one eye cautiously. The other opened, and I glanced around. Everything was more detailed. I could see the tiny crevices in what had previously appeared to be smooth stone along the walls.
I looked at Kat, and she jumped upright, pumping her tiny sword in the air.
“Yes! Good choice, kiddo! Your first evolution. I’m so proud!” She smiled broadly at me. “It’s not a breath attack, but it will stun or cause fear in most of the little shits we’ll need to deal with at first.”
“How do you–” I began, but she cut me off with a snort.
“Your eyes changed. Gaze isn’t a power that will work on me, because the system has bonded us on a sprite-ual level, but anything else will shit itself when you glare at it now. Look into one of the coins,” she suggested. The gold coin I’d been rolling back and forth was grasped between two talons and held up to my face. When I smiled, it looked really evil, now. All toothy fangs, interlocked and ready to snap through bone. The teeth weren’t any different from before, though.
My eyes were still a luminous purple, but black sparks seemed to drift slowly away from the points where a mammal would have tear ducts. It looked good. I preened and held the coin up at different angles to catch myself from all perspectives.
“Vanity is a draconic curse. That’s a freebie, lizard!” Kat chuckled. I shook my other arm and tossed her to the ground, earning an outraged squawk. I knew she was right. I’d never spent more than the obligatory twice-daily two minutes brushing my teeth in front of a mirror before. Now I could happily spend hours staring at myself.
I no longer felt full, and while I wasn’t feeling terribly hungry, I didn’t know how quickly the measly few kilos of biomass I had left would disappear. I needed to eat. I did not want to lose control. A dragon didn’t have to be a monster.
“I guess I deserved that. OK, handsome. Time to get started. I reckon getting Gaze on your first roll makes doing the first floor viable. We can always retreat up here if you get into trouble. So how about it, big guy? Ready to spend some coins?” I narrowed my eyes at her as she dusted herself off.
“On what?” I asked suspiciously. I coiled my tail between the tiny woman and my hoard.
“Unlocking the first floor of your future dungeon, silly. There are a couple of reasons to do so, before your ‘it’s my money, geroff,’ mentality kicks in,” she added hurriedly. “Just try to remember how greedy you were back on Earth? You didn’t care as long as your flatmates paid their bills on time, right?”
“And did their bloody washing up,” I grumbled, but I conceded the point.
“The greed… that’s the draconic form, and it’s altering your mind. Now, before the lizard brain that rules you tries to eat me, first of all, just know that you can’t. I’m incorporeal.” How the hell did she keep smacking me with her sword then? “And secondly, you’ve got to spend money to make money. Surely you remember that from before you discovered a love of shiny things, you overgrown magpie!”
She wasn’t wrong, and while I felt a burning hatred at the idea of spending money, the possibility of making it was suppressing my angry greed-demon. Somewhat.
“How much can we make?” I asked, my neck snaking forward to bring my snout to a stop a few inches from the sprite. I resisted the urge to call her 'thief' in a well-known British actor's voice.
“Depends on the rooms we build once we clear it. You’ll have to fight your way through each floor we unlock before we can use it, but you’ll get coins for your kills and biomass from the mobs you eat. You could think of it like a summoned larder. It really is a win-win all around,” she said, utterly unfazed by my fangs glistening mere inches from her face. “You can expect a steady income of coins, possibly rare elements and materials as well, depending on what resources and loot spawn.”
My heartbeat increased. I knew Kat was manipulating me, but the tiny woman in her steel swimwear didn’t seem to be lying to me. Her gaze was steady. Her hands didn’t waver as she gestured. I was confident that she was telling me the truth.
I reached out mentally and spent one hundred and fifty gold to upgrade my dungeon core to level one. My hoard shrank slightly beneath me, and I snarled before I could catch myself.
Unnamed Dungeon.
Level: N/A
Floors: 1 (to be conquered)
A hatch materialised on the floor by one of the walls. It was six feet square and made from thick, well-aged planks of some dark wood. Kat hopped up onto my shoulder as I swept past her. She clung on like a semi-naked pirate hanging from the mast of an old sloop. Her sword swung round in circles to spur me on, for once not being employed as a whip against some delicate part of my anatomy.
I stopped facing the new trapdoor that led down into Mount Bob. I glanced at Kat, who hung from my left leg, before she dropped to the ground gracefully.
“All it takes is to touch the hatch, Bob. You aren’t strong enough to move it yourself yet, but if you poke it, it will open. On the other side, it’s all on you.”
“What can we expect?” I was nervous. I hadn’t been a martial artist, or an ex-soldier, or a total sociopath. My upbringing was pretty blessed; my mum and dad had been well-to-do, so my hated job had only been for show. I spent most of my free time pining for a girl who had friend-zoned me years ago. My greatest struggle had been avoiding getting kicked out of the polo club for my drunken rants and not pissing Dad off enough that he’d cut off my credit card.
I knew I wasn’t suited to deal with this kind of shit, despite the way my new body made me feel strong, powerful, and superior. Kat saw my uncertainty and gave me a double thumbs up, bouncing in place as she did so.
“Food, and treasure, baby-Smaug. Food and treasure.”
I grinned at her and stretched out my snout to nudge the iron ring on the hatch. It swung open silently. I’d been expecting an ominous creak and had prepared a WD-40 joke to break the tension—yet another wasted opportunity. Kat leapt onto my back and slapped me in the ear with her sword.
“Giddy up, pony!” she cried loudly, and despite the indignity, I slipped forward and disappeared into the darkness beneath my new home.
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