“You want me to jump out of the cave?” Had she been so offended by my reaction to her stupid title that she now wanted me dead?

  “Your body knows how to fly already, you Tribulation. You need to hunt before we can start on the dungeon. So off you hop!” She was standing on top of my head, her sword sticking forward in my field of vision as she pointed out at what looked like a very long fall indeed.

  The mountain I was already beginning to think of as 'mine' was surrounded by a series of forested hills. A river flowed down, sourced at the foot of my mountain.

  “I christen this place… Mount Bob!” I declared proudly.

  The thin line of blue threaded its way across the greenery below. It ran between several of the surrounding hills before painting a lazy blue-green sine wave across a stretch of grassy plains.

  I clamped down to the stone and cautiously extended my head out past the lip of my aerie. As soon as I passed the threshold, the wind tore at me. Transparent secondary eyelids slid across to protect my eyes like built-in aviator goggles. I could see flocks of birds, tiny specks, swirling far below me. I discovered my claws were sharp and strong enough to dig into stone as I craned my long neck round to look up at the top of my new home.

  We weren’t at the top of the mountain. Not anywhere close. My nest was perhaps three-quarters of the way up. The actual peak of Mount Bob was lost in streaming clouds. Looking down towards the ground, my stomach didn’t lurch, my muscles didn’t tense, although my claws bit slightly deeper into the stone.

  The sides were almost sheer for hundreds of metres below me. They gradually flared out, perhaps a kilometre below my perch. Further down, the frosty-looking slopes gave way to a forested area, with tall trees rising up to block the sun and my vision from the craggy landscape.

  “You want me to jump?” I called against the wind. The gale snatched my words away from me and sent them up the mountain.

  “Of course! Stop being a baby!” Kat’s voice came through perfectly clearly. I felt her almost negligible weight shift from standing on my head to straddling my neck, just behind the crown of short horns that formed a spiky frill where my head joined my neck. “Look, I’m coming with you, so giddy up, horsey!” I felt her tiny thighs tighten around my scales, and she slapped the flat of her miniature greatsword against my neck like a jockey with a whip.

  I felt an intense desire to establish some boundaries with the tiny woman, but I had a feeling I needed her more than she needed me. She was probably still salty about me laughing at her title. And her metal boob coverings. Silvery curves and deep cleavage, albeit on an eight-inch scale, couldn’t be very comfortable.

  I pulled my head back into the cave and moved towards my hoard. My purple eyes lingered on the pile of coins lovingly, I caressed the heap with my gaze, following its contours with all the love and attention–

  Something hit me on the nub that was my right ear, making me yelp.

  “Stop eye-fucking your treasure. Why are you back in here? The hoard is safe, we can go hunting, and you need to eat regularly! You don’t want to find out what happens when you get hungry.”

  “A wise man once said, ‘If you think you can fly, take off from the bloody ground.’ I’m not going to throw myself off a mountain ledge until I’ve done a couple of tests, OK, princess?” I snarled. I could snarl extremely well now, as well as roar. The sound of inch-long fangs snapping closed at the end made it pop.

  I spread my wings and glanced back at them. The expanses of leathery flesh reached out four feet to either side of my narrow body. I flexed, and something that must have come as part of the being-a-dragon-now package, activated.

  The wings beat, my wings, and my body rose slightly off the ground, a cloud of dust spreading away in a circle as my claws settled back on the stone. I took a short run and leapt upwards before triggering that previously unknown instinct. Three flaps later, I turned, banking sharply as my claws clattered against the far wall before pushing off, and I flew to the other side of my hoard chamber in a gentle glide.

  “Happy now?” my uninvited rider asked in an acerbic tone.

  “Not really. How the hell do I get back here after I fly out there?” My tail waved in the direction of the open sky.

  “Did you see any other massive mountains around here? You live on the single most obvious landmark for hundreds of miles!” Kat snapped. “You’re just looking for excuses to be a baby about this!”

  “I am a baby, you harpy!”

  “I know, baby, but you can stop acting like one!” she replied.

  “Gliding down seems easy enough, how the fuck will I fly back up?”

  “You need to smarten up, kiddo. Get your head out of your ass, and your eyes back on the prize! If you couldn’t do this, I wouldn’t be telling you to do it, would I?” My head swung back towards my beloved pile of treasure, and I earned another thwack to my ear. I wasn’t sure if she knew how much that stung or if it was an accident. I suspected it was the former. “Not that prize you horse-faced buffoon! More biomass! Your first evolution! Now stop being a wuss and throw yourself off this mountain!”

  I couldn’t see her, but I had the feeling the pixie was clutching one of my baby horns in one hand and waving her sword over her head with the other. Save me from crazy sprites! I silently prayed to any being who might be listening.

  I slithered back over to the edge and stuck my head out, transparent membranes sliding into place to guard my eyes against the wind. I took a deep breath. Then another. Kat slapped my earhole again, and I snarled, lunging forwards and hoping to god my brand-new draconic instincts wouldn’t fail me. There was also a sliver of me, a mean-spirited part of myself, that hoped Her Immortal Majesty Kat the-ever-annoying-sprite would lose her grip and fall down the mountain.

  No such luck, alas. My companion and her armoured bikini clung on, bare thighs gripping my scaled neck tightly as we plummeted. I narrowed my eyes and kept my wings pulled in close like a stooping falcon. As the tops of the trees began to come close, I expanded them to a glide position, leathery wings snapping out wide and catching the air.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  We shot across the treetops, foliage blurring only a few meters below us. A few flaps and we gained a little altitude. I roared in delight. The faint regret I felt about losing my human body vanished as I flew across the forest.

  People often discuss freedom, and ‘equality under the law’ is frequently mentioned as a key component of that, or how wealth won’t buy happiness, only opportunities. Humans know nothing, I thought with draconic smugness. As I soared over those trees, flying for the first time in my life, I knew what true freedom meant. I was an eagle looking down over my domain. No, I’m a damn DRAGON!

  I hissed happily, the rushing wind snatching the noise away, and Kat cackled away from her perch on my neck. I flapped hard to gain some altitude and surveyed the earth below me. Something moved. A shadow shifting in a way that my suddenly predatory mind understood instinctively was not the wind or some action of nature.

  Banking to the right, I circled down towards the suspicious motion. My claws flexed in anticipation. I was coming in with the sun to my back, my winged shadow racing across the ground ahead of me. As the patch of darkness passed over the rock that had caught my eye, something rose and bolted towards the treeline.

  I slowed for a moment to carefully line myself up, acting entirely on instincts I hadn’t known I possessed. Then my wings folded against my sides, and I fell like a thunderbolt, claws outstretched to latch onto the fleeing creature.

  Flaring my wings at the last second, I broke most of my momentum as my claws sank into soft flesh, and then we tumbled across the ground. I sank my jaws into the back of the target's neck, fangs biting deep and filling my mouth with the taste of fresh blood. It made my heart beat faster, the heavy-iron taste forcing me to bite down harder.

  As we rolled to a stop, two small, fluffy feet slammed into my stomach, knocking the breath from my lungs and forcing me to release the grip on the thing's neck. The force of the kick had pushed it free from my claws, but in doing so it had crippled itself. The creature's shoulders and limbs had been shredded as it pulled free from my grasp, and the beast flopped away weakly, doomed by its final attack.

  The bunny looked at me with big brown eyes, just beneath a small horn that stuck out from the centre of its forehead. The sleek grey fur was now matted with its blood, and torn away where it had kicked free from my grip.

  “Sorry, dude,” I muttered. I’d meant it sincerely but it kind of came off as ‘suck it up kid’. My jaws flashed out and closed on the poor bunny's throat before my neck snapped backwards and dealt the deathblow. As it keeled over, I felt an urge to feed. The bones in my jaw clicked apart like a snake’s, and I ate the bunny whole, horn and all.

  Uni-Bunny level 4 slain.

  Gold earned!

  Seven gold added to the Hoard.

  I barely noticed the announcement as I consumed the rabbit in one piece. It felt like the opposite of passing a kidney stone, but in a weirdly good way. After a few minutes, I could turn my head enough to watch the lump moving slowly down my neck.

  “Woohoo! That was a rush! I jumped off in the tumble but damn, you went all komodo on that fluffy little bugger!” Kat grew out of my nose and dropped down to hang a leg on either side of my snout as I went almost crosseyed to try and focus on her. “You enjoyed that too, right? That was fucking amazing! Back on my world, I could fly too, but it was more like levitation. You can actually fly!” she burbled happily.

  “Yes, flying is pretty cool, you psycho.” I coughed as the raw bunny reached my chest, and my throat felt clearer again. The importance of the previous message sank in. “Holy hell, yes!”

  “I told you you’d get coins for killing,” she said shrewdly. “Maybe you should listen to your wise Elder’s advice more?” She crossed her arms under her steel-clad breasts and glared at me.

  Biomass stored:

  14 KG

  Biomass required for evolution: 25 KG.

  I swallowed audibly as the body finally cleared my throat and disappeared into whatever passed for my stomach. It had felt surprisingly pleasant; I would have thought having to distend my neck to accommodate the oversized bunny would have made the whole thing painful, but it hadn’t.

  “That was a big bunnie. I just gained five and a half kilos of biomass! I’m over halfway to my evolution!” I exclaimed happily.

  “Must have been a high-level bunny?” Kat raised an eyebrow at me questioningly.

  “Level four. How was it so easy when I’m not even level one?” Her sword flicked out and plinked me between the eyes.

  “Dragons are a big step up from Uni-bunnies, Bob.”

  “Oh shit! One of my options was to become one of those things!” I gasped, realising how I could very easily have been prey, rather than predator.

  “Lucky for us both, you’re only a little stupid!” Kat cackled.

  “Why is it lucky for you?” I asked, narrowing my purple eyes at the tiny woman.

  “Never mind! Look, let's go catch some more food, eh? You want to grow up big and strong, don’t you? Yes, you do!” She was speaking to me as if I were a child. I was not impressed, and I raised a single scaly eyebrow. “OK! Tell you what, I’ll fill you in a bit more on the grown-up stuff once you get your first evolution. You need to know a few things about your hunger before you start trying to deal with anyone other than monsters. Fair?” She stuck out a tiny hand, and this time, I did go cross-eyed trying to focus on it.

  “It’s hard to trust you right now, Kat. What the hell do you mean my hunger will be an issue?” I snapped. She flapped her wings and fluttered backwards to land on the ground and paced up and down for a moment before fixing with a fierce glare.

  “You know how humans need to keep eating right?” I nodded. If this was part of the adult stuff she wanted to keep secret for now, I wasn’t terribly excited to hear the rest of it. “Well, so do you. Your body works at a slower rate, but your biomass will gradually tick down. You ever know anyone who got really grouchy when they missed a meal?”

  “One or two. You’re saying I’ll get hangry? That’s not so bad.” I shrugged, which is a very eloquent gesture when you’ve got wings on your shoulders. She blurred forward and punched me in the nose.

  “Hangry is just the start of it, buffoon! While you’re just a baby, the odds are you’ll get yourself killed. When you’re all grown up, you’ll burn down cities and eat half a town when you fancy a midnight snack and there’s nothing in the fridge! Why do you think they sacrifice virgins to dragons, numb nuts? Better to lose one every now and then than risk losing everything if you get the munchies. Think of the sacrifices as a bit like DoorDash for giant lizards.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t have a comeback to that. I resolved to remain suitably well-fed at all times.

  “Look, Bob, I’ve only got your best intentions at heart. I can only have your best intentions,” the sprite added slightly bitterly. “Let’s top you off, then pop back up to the hoard so you can chill there while you evolve, OK?” All sunshine and sugar again. The woman was more changeable than the weather.

  Three mutant bunnies later, and I was fat and full.

  Biomass stored:

  28.5 KG

  Biomass required for evolution: 25 KG.

  Evolve: Y/N?

  “Hold off until we get you safe again!” Kat advised. “Depending on what evolution you pick, you could be out of it for a couple of hours!”

  Despite having gained a fair bit of weight, I flew back up to the aerie without difficulty; I felt my hoard calling me back to it. As I stretched out on my slightly increased pile of shinies, I pulled up my status screen again.

  Evolve: Y/N?

  I clicked yes.