Much like humans, saurian manabeasts have increased physical and mental abilities compared to the average of their species. However, unlike humans, the increases they receive seem to depend on the species. Smallarms, dreadwalkers, and longnecks benefit little from the early realms, rarely reaching the higher ones, then again, it could be nature’s way of balancing things, a high realm dreadwalker is worthy of its name and demands large subjugation forces to contain.
— Excerpt from The Saurian Primer
Day 62, 11:45 AM
I spent my days skulking in the Summersweald’s canopy, covering several thousand miles. None of the books I read mentioned it, but the jungle is split into three distinct strata, possibly more. The ground level, the canopy level, and the airspace.
The canopy is full of serpents and elongated saurians, whom the bestiaries lumped together and called them clingers. There were green stripe clingers, blue dot poisonous clingers, and countless others, all imaginatively named based on the way they looked. In a world in which people named their children after objects, natural sights, and phenomena, nobody labeled animals after themselves. Maybe I could do it? Tyrannodandelion Rex. I just need to find a menacing enough weed.
Few of the beasts were aggressive, none as dangerous as the ultraraptors, but slowly, things were changing, as the manabeasts’ average realm steadily grew.
A back-finned clinger glared at me, its back sail shaking menacingly, warning me to stay away. The six-foot-long decorated lizard had powerful claws, but its short limbs made it quite clear that its talons weren’t meant for fighting. No, what I had to look out for was the crocodilian jaw, lined with short, pointy teeth.
I stared back at the creature, it was blocking a nice, wide branch, the easiest way forward, but I could walk around it. A part of me didn’t want to. I had armed myself with a club, but haven’t used it once, since nothing had been hostile ever since I’d made it.
The staring contest stretched, and the clinger didn’t seem inclined to give up. Reptiles sure were persistent.
Fine, I thought with a sigh and turned around. The instant I broke eye contact, claw scraped against bark, and the clinger lunged towards me.
You cheeky little bugger! I spun, my club aimed straight at the side of its head, right behind its eye. The fierce maw was wide open, but clicked shut when wood met skull. The blow shattered my improvised weapon, but sent the sneaky saurian over the side of the branch. It hissed, tumbling towards the distant jungle floor.
I barely suppressed a chuckle. I couldn’t believe I yielded before a lizard, agreeing to go around, and the dumb thing attacked me. The arrogant critter hit the soft ground with a squelch. I couldn’t see it, but the sound was loud enough to be heard from a distance away.
And I wasn’t the only one who caught it.
The tree I stood on shook violently as something massive started running towards me. I went down, hugging the branch as it started swaying like a typhoon had hit it. A sudden crack reverberated through my body, rattled my brain, and made the world spin. As I gathered my bearings, I realized my vision wasn’t swimming. The tree was slowly toppling over.
As I fell, I caught sight of a massive bipedal creature. Nearly half its bulk was an impossibly large head with a jaw which could bite an elephant in half. Unlike a T-Rex, the monster didn’t have tiny arms. Evolution saw it fit to remove the dead limbs entirely, overcompensating with sheer mass and the dread its gigantic jaw inspired.
Dreadwalker, I recognized the creature before unceremoniously smashing onto the ground. My wish came true, I found a Jurrassic icon, and it found me too. The massive teeth, arrayed in three rows, crunched the clinger into paste, staring at me all the while.
Non-manabeast dreadwalkers had strength equivalent to fifth realm knights. And the way this one’s golden, reptilian eyes locked onto me in an instant meant it had a mindcore or a dualcore, which allowed it to see the glow of mana.
A glance told me everything. The only felled tree was the one I was hiding on. The monster rushed over, saw the fallen clinger, knew someone had thrown it off the tree, then found me and smashed the correct tree with its tail. All of that in a matter of moments.
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I was too deep in the Summersweald, running on the ground was suicide, but maybe I stood a chance. With a dreadwalker running after me, everything with half a brain would flee, and the rest might serve as a distraction. That even sounded like a plan.
The dreadwalker just stood there, staring at me, possibly drawing some perverse satisfaction from the terror it expected me to feel. Hubris.
I burst out of the branches, running full speed. The dreadwalker lurched into motion. The staggering tremors it made with each step threatened to throw me off my feet, but my agility pulled through, my feet unerringly finding purchase in the wobbling ground.
The manabeast was massive, which didn’t equate slow. As it picked up speed it grew frighteningly fast, but the bulk made its inertia overwhelming. I turned right and kept sprinting, the dreadwalker didn’t. It tried, shifting its body, but the soil flowed under its feet. The monstrosity slipped, crashing into a tree and snapping it like a rotten plank.
Then against all logic, the felled tree burst into flames where it touched the behemoth. Looking behind my shoulder, my eyes nearly popped out at the sight. Saurians really had mystical abilities. I knew it from the books, but seeing a giant lizard unleash a burst of flames around its body to disentangle itself from the tree it had crashed into was still mind-boggling.
The beast erected itself, and I looked away, its heavy footfalls telling me where it was just as clearly as if I had been watching it run.
I ran, and the monster followed. The distance I opened shrank as it picked up speed, but whenever it got close, I repeated the maneuver, sending it crashing. The dance continued. Hours passed, and I sent it stumbling a dozen times, but it didn’t matter. The giant lizard was determined and persisted in its pursuit even as night fell.
Darkness worked against me. My night vision was decent, superhuman in fact, and I assigned another attribute point into physique, pushing it to twenty-five. The difference was minor, but it still allowed me to jump over a fallen trunk, partially submerged into the soft earth.
More time passed and despite the darkness, I managed to trip up the dreadwalker one more time before I lost my footing. My foot caught a log sneakily sticking out of the ground by three or four inches. I stubbed my toe, bursting the half-rotten wood into pieces, but the vengeful thing knocked me down to the ground.
The dreadwalker was right behind me. Wind whistled as its head and massive jaws snapped towards me. I rolled to the side, pushing against the ground with all I had, but the creature’s mouth was simply too big to roll away from.
Swordlike teeth snapped shut around my ankle, and the creature smacked me left and right, shaking me like a toy, before it threw me up into the air to swallow me like a snack.
It was a mistake. I caught a low-hanging branch, my foot, ankle, and knee broken. Despite the burning pain, I clutched the branch with all my strength. Then I heard a whoosh. Three rows of teeth closed around my body, smashing me like a steel press.
I awoke with a jerk, throwing Ruby off my chest as I sat.
“What?” She mumbled groggily, snapping her eyes open, stabbing me with a very angry glare of those awoken at half past two in the morning.
“Bad dream, a dreadwalker ate me.”
“Silly, there are no dreadwalkers within two thousand miles. Go back to sleep.” She tried to drag me back to bed, but I got up.
“I’m going to wash up and head to the library.” I went over to the basin. “Do you have paper and writing implements here?”
“Can that wait?”
“Sure, you can give them to me in the library when you get back to work.”
I tried to access my photographic memory while freshening myself up, but the images of books spread against the library’s shelf were gone.
In the library, Ruby’s master greeted me with a nod, and I went to read the common books until she came to work. She approached my desk, left the standard-sized stack of twenty-four papers, an inkwell and a quill before pecking my temple.
“Don’t you transcribe those books, or you’ll join me here as a librarian.”
“I know, I know, I wanted to practice some math and calligraphy.”
“You and calligraphy? Are you kidding?”
I smiled at her. “Just watch.”
I laid a paper before me, uncorked the inkwell, properly dipped the quill, and placed it in my right with my left. Then I started writing from my shoulder while keeping my wrist locked, flowing oval letters a perfect example of penmanship.
“You got to be kidding me,” she muttered, and the blue screen agreed, popping up after I’ve completed two lines worthy of Initial Calligraphy.
“See you for lunch? We can discuss a book, if you’d like.” She eyed me and nodded, but frowned when I mentioned the book I had in mind. “We could debate about Airblade Mountainpeak’s trial.”
“What’s there to discuss about that traitor?” Her voice was cutting.
The ancient case was quite controversial, with the majority of the awakened condemning the man, but a minority, mostly those with common origins, zealously defended his actions, and saw them as defending the heart of justice over unrelenting shackles of law.
I just smiled, but she folded her arms. “You’re sleeping on the floor if you spout nonsense.”
I did not sleep on the floor.
