Limitless Evolution As a Snake

[System: Mate]

[System: You didn’t even touch it]

Yeah. I know, I’m as surprised as you are, old mate.

My eyes lock on the dead crab hanging there like a big rusty piñata. That white meat oozing out around the rebar looks so good. Like, stupid good. Like crab leg dinner at a place with tablecloths good, except the tablecloth is mud and the waiter is a rebar spike.

Can we eat that?

I already know what I want, and I want that crab in my belly before some cleanup crew drags it off to wherever dead pit monsters go.

[System: Bloody oath mate, you want to cook that in front of everyone]

Yeah. Little fire, little garlic, whatever passes for garlic down here, I don’t care; I just watched that thing almost bite my head clean off, and I feel like I earned a meal out of the deal.

[System: Here’s the thing though. The blokes running this fight, they can’t understand a lick of snake. You start hissing at them about wanting to borrow a hot plate for your crab meat, all they’re gonna hear is a little zip tie going ssssssss real aggressive like. They’re not exactly gonna hand you a stove]

Right. Of course, I’ve been having full conversations in my skull with a magic system that talks like it’s from the outback, and somewhere along the way I forgot that to every single creature standing around this pit, I am just a snake. A small, red, currently steaming snake that flops around and occasionally squeaks like a toy at things.

Some kid in a jumpsuit is gonna come scoop it into a bin labelled BIOHAZARD, and that’ll be that, ninety years of evolution wasted on a species that never got a fair shot at becoming dinner.

[System: Don’t get sad about it, mate. I got you; later we will work it out.]

Garlic butter. My mouth doesn’t even have the right shape for drooling, but something in my chest does it anyway, some ancestral human part of my brain still convinced I’ve got lips and a tongue that isn’t forked.

Fine. Deal, but I want proof this isn’t just you stalling me

[System: Mate, would I lie to you? Don’t answer that.]

I let out a long wheeze that’s probably supposed to be a laugh, and the steam coming off my scales curls up into the mud-thick air, and somewhere behind me the crowd is staring at the dead crab like it might just get back up and finish the job.

It doesn’t.

I flop back down into the muck, exhausted, victorious, and criminally unfed, already plotting the day I get to hunt something better and cook it myself instead of just accidentally murdering it with vibes and bad luck.

Someone up top starts yelling, and it’s not the fun kind of yelling either. I crane my neck up out of the mud, still steaming, still coated in bug guts and capybara fur and whatever the crab left behind, and there’s a whole cluster of guys in cheap suits standing at the edge of the pit just staring down at me like I grew a second head.

One of them’s got a clipboard. He keeps looking at it, then looking at me, then looking at it again like the numbers are gonna change if he stares hard enough.

”That’s not possible,” he says, and another guy next to him just goes, ”It killed three of them, three.”

I’m not an It, rude.

A third guy, younger, still got the plastic wrap crinkle of a brand new jumpsuit on him, leans over the rail and squints down at me like I’m about to keel over any second. Which, fair, I probably look like it, and I’m running on fumes and spite at this point.

”We’re pulling the rest of the matches for today,” the clipboard guy says, and just like that, the whole pit goes quiet, crowd groaning like someone cancelled the second half of the footy.

I don’t even get a say in it. Some guy with thick rubber gloves reaches down and scoops me up, and I’m too wrung out to even think about biting him, which honestly might be a first for me. I just hang there, limp, dangling from his fist like a piece of red rope, getting carried off through the mud and the noise and the smell of a hundred sweaty men who just lost money betting against a snake.

They walk me through a back hallway, concrete and buzzing lights, past crates and barrels and what I’m pretty sure is a guy hosing blood off a table, and then I get set down in a room that smells like bleach and old dog.

Which, turns out, is exactly what it used to be.

There’s a kennel, proper wire mesh and all, except someone’s gone and shoved a memory foam dog bed in there, the fancy orthopedic kind, and there’s a little portable telly propped up on a crate outside the bars playing static, and a shallow dish of warm water sitting in the corner that I can only assume is meant to be my bath.

Look at this. Look at me. Yesterday I was drowning in a bucket; today I’ve got a bed better than the one I slept on as an actual human.

Old mate, I’ve made it.

[System: Yeah look at you, proper five star accommodation]

I slither onto the bed and just melt into it, boneless, every muscle in my stupid noodle body finally allowed to stop being useful for five minutes. The foam actually holds a dent where I land, which feels like luxury I did not earn but will absolutely accept.

So what’s the go, when’s the next fight I flick my tongue out, tasting the bleach-and-dog smell of the room.

Give me a minute here. I spent the first part of my life down here hiding under rocks from things smaller than my own head. I once spent four hours wedged behind a pebble because a beetle looked at me funny, and now there are three dead monsters and I’m the one still breathing.

[System: Yeah nah, about that.]