I climbed out of the water with a fish in my mouth and murder in my heart.
The Kashi was still twitching — not dead, just stunned from my venom strike. Its tail slapped against the rocks in a rhythmic *thwack-thwack-thwack* as I hauled myself up the bank, water streaming off my scales in rivulets. I felt like a drowned rat. A very angry, very scaled drowned rat.
Vesperra appeared at the top of the bank. She'd been waiting — of course she'd been waiting, she probably calculated the exact trajectory of my waterborne exit and had positioned herself at the most convenient observation point. Her crimson eyes swept over me, checking for injuries with the efficiency of a parametric assessment.
"You're not hurt."
Not a question. A statement. Relief, maybe, buried under three feet of composure.
"I'm fine," I said, spitting the fish onto the rock beside me. It landed with a wet slap and immediately started flopping. "Bit bruised. Bit wet. But fine."
She nodded. Once. Then she stepped back and gave me space — the kind of space that said *I was worried but I'm not going to make it a thing.*
I appreciated that. I really did.
Then I turned my attention to the real problem.
The hatchlings had regrouped. They'd formed clusters — little factions, little alliances, little *teams* — and they were watching me from their respective positions with varying degrees of curiosity, concern, and what I was fairly certain was suppressed laughter.
Two blues and a black. A green and a black. A red with a black and a green. And so on.
Every single hatchling had found a partner. Every single one except—
My eyes landed on two familiar figures.
A black dragon and a green dragon, sitting side by side. An and Verra.
*Oh.*
*Oh, it's you two.*
An met my gaze with her usual blank expression — calm, unreadable, nothing to see here. But Verra — Verra's tail was twitching again. That tiny, involuntary twitch that said *I know something happened and I'm hoping you haven't figured out what.*
I stared at them. They stared at me. Verra's tail twitched faster.
*Confessed.*
They'd confessed. Not with words — with body language so transparent it might as well have been a written statement. An's calm was the calm of someone who'd already accepted the consequences. Verra's twitch was the twitch of someone who felt guilty but didn't know how to apologize without admitting fault.
In my previous life, I'd managed a team of twelve. I'd learned to read people — their tells, their tells, their micro-expressions, the tiny involuntary signals that leaked through when they were lying or hiding something. An was good. Really good. Her face was a mask. But Verra — Verra was an open book written in neon.
I knew exactly what had happened. They'd been working together, they'd gotten impatient, and they'd triggered the bank collapse before I was ready. They'd known I was sleeping. They'd known the water would sweep me in. And they'd done it anyway.
Was it malicious? Probably not. An was strategic — she'd calculated that the water wouldn't seriously hurt me, that a dragon could survive a dunking, that the benefit of getting the fish into the valley outweighed the risk of getting me wet. She'd been right, too. I wasn't hurt. Just annoyed.
But the principle still mattered. You don't make decisions that affect the team without consulting the team. Especially when the team is you.
I filed this away. Not for now — for later. When I was dry. When I was fed. When I had a plan.
*File updated: Category An & Verra. Status: confirmed. Timeline: pending.*
Now. Fish.
The Kashi were already in the valley — fifty of them, maybe more, churned in by the collapse. The trap had worked better than planned. The problem now wasn't catching them. It was *counting* them. Mapping them. Figuring out which ones were small enough to hunt and which ones would eat the hunter.
I cast three sensing vines. They erupted from the soil in a neat row, each one topped with a glowing green eye, and I directed them into the flooded valley — one at the left wall, one at the center, one near the drainage crack on the far side. Three underwater viewpoints, sweeping the basin.
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The magic came easier this time. The casting circle formed in half the time it had the first time, the symbols sharper, the green light brighter. My element familiar was working with me now — not just adapting the vine's senses, but *optimizing* them, filtering out noise, sharpening the image, translating the underwater world into data my brain could process without effort.
This was what it meant to have an element bond. A normal spellcaster cast a spell and hoped it worked. I cast a spell and had a literal elemental goddess in my corner, fine-tuning every detail, making sure the output was exactly what I needed.
It was cheating. It was glorious. And I was only just beginning to understand how deep it went.
Surveillance sweep: online. Three feeds, full coverage, real-time.
The vines mapped the valley in minutes. The Kashi were distributed unevenly — most of them clustered near the inflow channel where the current was still strong, confused and disoriented from the ride in. A few had already found the drainage crack and were testing it, pressing against the shallow outflow. None of them had found a way out. The vine barriers I'd woven at the drainage point were holding — one-way, fish-shaped, dragon-approved.
I counted. Thirty-two. Forty-one. Fifty-three. Fifty-seven Kashi in the valley, ranging from one-meter juveniles to five-meter adults. The juveniles were huntable — small enough that a coordinated strike from two or three hatchlings could pin them. The adults were another story. Too fast, too armored, too full of teeth.
But fifty-seven fish, even if only the smaller ones were viable, was still more food than we'd seen since leaving the cave.
"Need anything else?" Vesperra asked.
"No. Just time."
She nodded and settled onto her belly beside the channel, crimson eyes half-lidded. She was going to wait with me. Of course she was. She'd been doing this since the cave — waiting, watching, making sure I didn't get myself killed. The most overqualified babysitter in any universe.
I caught her watching me from the corner of my eye. Not the casual glance of someone checking on you — the steady, calculating gaze of someone running an assessment. Like a manager reviewing an intern's quarterly report and trying to decide if they were promotion material or a liability.
In my previous life, I'd hated that look. The one that said *I'm evaluating you and you don't know the criteria.* But from Vesperra, it didn't feel like judgment. It felt like... attention. The kind of attention that meant she was keeping track. Not because she had to. Because she chose to.
She gave the faintest nod — barely a movement, almost nothing — and I had the absurd impression that she approved. Of the fish trap. Of the monitoring system. Of the fact that I'd dragged myself out of a wall of water and immediately started setting up surveillance.
Or maybe she was just watching Munch sleep. With Vesperra, it was always hard to tell.
I turned toward the shellcrab shell where Munch was still sleeping.
Time to wake up the idiot.
Munch was sprawled inside the shell like a crime scene photo. Belly up. Tongue out. One leg twitching. Drool everywhere. She looked less like a dragon and more like a stuffed animal that had been left in a washing machine.
I'd brought the fish. It was still twitching.
I dropped it on the shell next to her head. The fish's tail smacked against the carapace with a satisfying *thwack.*
Munch didn't move.
I picked up the fish in my claw and pressed the point of one talon into its head, pinning it. The fish's tail — freed from the pressure of my body — started whipping back and forth with renewed vigor, like a metronome set to "angry."
I positioned the fish over Munch's head.
*Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.*
The fish tail slapped against her round white snout. Once. Twice. Three times. Her head rocked from side to side with each impact.
She didn't wake up.
*This creature is genuinely unkillable.*
I pressed harder. The fish's tail whipped faster.
*THWACK-THWACK-THWACK.*
"Mrah!"
One eye opened. Then the other. Then, without any transition from sleep to wakefulness, Munch's jaws opened and she bit directly at the thing that was hitting her.
*Crunch.*
She bit off the entire back third of the fish — tail and all — in a single, devastating snap.
I stared at the fish. What was left of it was now missing approximately one-third of its mass. The tail — my monitoring tool, my alarm clock, my perfectly good snack — was gone. In Munch's mouth. Being swallowed.
*...That was my fish.*
I'd drowned for that fish. I'd been slammed into rock, dragged through a channel, and nearly executed by my own trap — and the fish had lasted exactly four seconds in Munch's mouth. In my previous life, this was the equivalent of staying until 2am to finish a project report, handing it to your boss the next morning, and watching them eat your donut while saying "thanks."
I looked at Munch. Munch looked at me. Her white eyes were bright, her mouth full of fish, her tail already starting to wag.
She swallowed. Then she nuzzled forward and pressed her snout against my cheek. A soft, warm, slightly fishy-smelling nuzzle. The dragon equivalent of *thank you for the food, you're the best.*
I raised my claw and patted her on the head. One solid *pat* right between the eyes. Not gentle. Not affectionate. The pat of someone who is deeply, profoundly annoyed but has accepted that this is their life now.
"Get up. Follow me."
"Mrah~!"
She scrambled to her feet, slipped on the shell, righted herself, and came barreling after me as I climbed down. She hit the ground with a soft *whump,* rolled twice, and popped up like a cork, already running to catch up.
I walked to the edge of the shell and jumped down.
Behind me, I heard a sliding sound. Then a thump. Then another thump. Then silence.
I looked back.
Munch had tried to follow me off the shell. She had not, in fact, *jumped.* She had *slid.* Her round body had gone over the edge like a bar of soap down a drain, tumbling in a series of undignified impacts before landing in a heap at the base of the shell.
She was already getting up. Shaking herself off. Looking around as if nothing had happened.
I stared at her.
She looked at me. Tail wagging.
*...She's going to be the death of me.*
I turned and walked toward the channel. Munch trotted after me, her fat little legs pumping, her round belly swaying, her tongue already hanging out in anticipation of fish.
Behind me, from inside the shellcrab shell, I felt Vesperra's eyes on us.
I didn't look back. But I could *feel* her gaze — warm, steady, amused. And in that gaze, I imagined — just imagined — the faintest trace of something that might have been fondness.
For both of us.
I kept walking. Munch kept trotting. The fish kept swimming in the channel.
And for the first time since I'd hatched in this ridiculous cave, I felt like maybe — just maybe — I wasn't doing this alone.