Aqua Regalia [Monster Progression LitRPG]

"In the world of insects, gravity is negligible. Surface tension is king."

Cas recalled that line from an entomology paper she'd read somewhere. She couldn't remember the author's name, so the memory went uncited, but that was perhaps forgivable considering she was running for her life.

Well, crawling for her life.

It was day ten since she'd gotten her vision, the fifth since the ants had taken an interest in her.

The first time had been terrifying. The second time had been nerve wracking. After the tenth chase, however, running away from them had developed into an annoying habit, much like those mandatory work parties she always avoided. Cas never found social obligations to be 'fun', no matter the level of marketing that told her otherwise. Granted, maybe that was the reason she'd never really had any friends…

Huh…turns out self honesty was easier after you died.

The Ants were just on her tail when she found a nice stalk of grass and struggled up the blade. Looking back, she was disheartened to find the monster had caught up to her.

Granted, the ant chasing her was half her size, but it had a nightmarish face decorated with twitching antennae and gleaming jaws, and - unlike her - it had a lot of friends.

Why was it always the popular kids that came after her?

...

Cas raced up at a slow pace, keeping barely ahead of the black river of ants.

The first insect was too fast, however, and scythe-like mandibles closed around her. A feeling, more panic than pain, sparked up inside her and Cas rode it, wrenching at her gut and tearing herself free. The ant, jaws gummed up with jelly, halted, glued to the rough surface of the grass-stem. Chancing a look back, a traffic-jam had formed where the last ant had attacked her. Its sisters climbed over the trapped body and became stuck themselves wherever they contacted the glue.

Suckers!

Cas felt her glee cut short as she approached the tip of the grass blade, however. There, an immense water droplet hung, dragging the frame of the blade down with its watery.

'Idiot!' she berated herself. Of course there'd be dew in the morning!

She'd grown careless, thoughtless, and now

The plate of crystal in her center flashed back every ten microseconds or so, glittering like a star. Two inches behind her, the ants clumsily fell over one another, raising their heads silently and probing their air with stabbing antennae.

She ignored them for the time being. She still had two seconds before they reached her.

Two seconds… two whole seconds.

Flashing flies drifted about in lazy circles like they were buzzards, the snapping jaws of the ants closed in slow motion. Even her own movements were ponderous from her own perspective, a slow crawl that moved slower than her mind. The whole world seemed to drift by like molasses when compared to the dying speed of her own thoughts.

As it was, she had a lot of time to think.

Normally, getting away from the ants was easy. They were slower than her, and running up a grass blade and dropping off the tip had always been enough to lose their trail.

The stunt had never bothered her before, but this was the first time she'd been called to do it in the morning, and that little drop of dew… that insignificant bubble of water she'd ignored throughout her human life now seemed more important than the sea.

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Her own reflection stared back at her, suspended in the bulging surface of the water droplet.

This was her first time seeing herself. She'd long guessed that she had a physical body a lot like this. She left a trail, she was affected by physical forces like gravity and couldn't go through walls, and the ants took slimy chunks out of her enough times that she'd long abandoned the idea that she was just some disembodied consciousness. But…

She flickered her crystal back. The ants were noiseless beyond the chittering tap of their legs. Moment by moment, they approached. It felt like she was in a nightmare, forced to observe every detail of her impending death. But ahead of her was a different sort of terror, that of uncertainty.

She… was scared of the water.

At this scale, water wasn't wet. It was a death trap. It stuck to everything, it stuck to itself, and she'd seen a hundred mites drown in stray droplets. What would happen to her if she touched it? Would she even exist. Would she just melt? Why was she still afraid of dying!?

Another glance back. The ants were still far away.

She moved to the left of the grass blade, attempting to fall off the side.

It didn't work. All she could do was crawl, and her body - sticky like water and too small to have any substantial weight, simply flowed around the edge of the grass, sticking stubbornly to the stem. She was helpless against her own body, it seemed.

"Aghh!!" She mentally screamed, cursing at herself. "You stupid, useless, disgusting piece of snot!"

She couldn't walk, she couldn't jump, she couldn't even fall without permission in this body! She had to go off the tip, but…!

SCHKSCHKSCHKSCHK!

A horrid, chitinous sound reverberated through her body. Suddenly, black mandibles stabbed into her and grabbed hold of her crystal eye. This turned her vision, forcing her to look at the jaws as they clinked onto her.

What?

The ants, it turned out, were a clever bunch after all. They had the bright idea of crawling on the underside of the leaf! There, unobstructed by the roadblock Cas had left on the top surface, the first of the line had already reached her, and the rest were close behind.

…

The ants moved slower when walking upside down. That bought her a few more seconds.

She noted this with an otherworldly calm, as if the creature she'd inhabited was sharing its cold perspective on death. Slimes like her were a dime-a-dozen, after all. They were at the bottom of the food chain and everything ate them. Maybe it was ok if she was dead…and for a moment, she felt at peace. It wasn't anything substantial or poetic, but a kind of animal silence. Maybe this would be ok, after all. Circle of life, and all that. Certainly, she'd watched more than her fair share of creatures die, and now it was her turn-

"No!"

The thought stamped itself over all others, and Cas abandoned all tactics. Letting our a wailing screech that sounded like trickling water, she ran and tugged and dragged that half-pint ant along with her, inching closer to the droplet and … touched the water.

Her vision disappeared, and she fell into a dreamless sleep.

Awake, she was greeted with the vision of a cranny, surrounded on all sides by dirt.

She tried to move, and she did, crawling up. It was the same as before, but she felt heavier somehow. Crawling over the edge of the ravine, she was back in the light, once again lost a sea of grass and stones. Cas thought she was able to see further than before, out to two feet, maybe she discerned, noticing a pill bug crawling along in the distance.

Again, she tried to move, but it was sluggish, as if she was dragging an anchor. Curious she moved her crystal eye all about, looking for the source of the resistance: left, right, back, forward, up, and…

Her body rippled as she came face to face with the desiccated corpse of the ant, suspended inside her own body just below her crystal.

The sight was surreal. She was alive and carrying the body of her would-be killer. It was something she could've taken a year to process, were it not completely overshadowed by the screen that hovered in front of her. The screen that somehow knew her name and told her things she never could've believed.

Spoiler: Text sheet

If Cas could still muster facial expressions, she would've cast a suspicious gaze at the status screen blaring in front of her. It was… strange.

It was rather plain looking -- more like an excel sheet than anything you'd see in a videogame. In fact, it looked almost exactly like an excel sheet, down to the column markers and sheet tabs.

Though, why would the status screen look like a combination of a video game and a 2017 excel spreadsheet? And why would it be in English, or even in writing at all?

Maybe it was just presented in a format her mind found familiar? Cas thought. That certainly made sense, and considering she'd spent the the majority of her past life playing videogames and formatting Excel sheets -- it was clear she needed to get new hobbies this time round.