It was morning again, and my body had opinions about breakfast.

  Not subtle opinions. The capuchin hunger response was less a notification and more a persistent alarm — a continuous, low-grade distraction lodged somewhere behind my stomach that the engineering brain kept trying to override and couldn't. I had spent three days focused on building, planning, rationing mana, and not dying, and somewhere in that process I'd been treating the body like a vehicle instead of what it actually was: a biological system with non-negotiable input requirements.

  A civil engineer who ignores foundation loading gets a very specific kind of surprise. I was getting mine in the form of a headache, a tremor in my hands that wasn't fear-based for the first time since arrival, and a thirst that made my tongue feel like bark.

  Day three. The last day of the acclimation period. Twelve hours — maybe less — until the translation matrix came online and I could talk to people. And access Trait Assimilation? And Skill Evolution?

  I had to be alive and functional for that conversation. Which meant eating first. Drinking first. Doing both of those things in a canopy where everything was either predator, prey, or inexplicable.

  I set out with both golems in formation — one two meters ahead, one two meters behind, running the protocol I'd spent the overnight hours thinking up and testing: stay in visual range, if anything large approaches, make noise and move toward it while maintaining distance from me. Bait behavior. The most complex instruction set I'd given them. The front golem executed it with reasonable competence while the rear one occasionally faced the wrong direction and had to course-correct.

  The spear was in my right hand. The spring was loaded. The warmth behind my sternum was pulled in three directions — two golems, one mechanism — and the math was not generous.

  The Predator quest was still sitting in its mental storage. I could feel it the way you feel an overdue assignment — present, unaddressed, weighting everything around it.

  — — —

  The pitcher plants grew in clusters at mid-canopy altitude, where the light came through in wide shafts and the humidity collected in visible halos around the broad leaves. I'd found them yesterday and filed the general location. The water inside tasted like copper pipe — mineral, flat, a chemical profile my capuchin nose dissected into components I couldn't name and didn't enjoy. I drank until the thirst complaint dropped from urgent to background. It took more than I wanted.

  The nodule vines were worse. Small, starchy growths at branch junctions, requiring careful extraction — pull too hard and the vine snapped, sending the nodule dropping into the lower canopy. I ate with the specific joylessness of someone performing maintenance on a system they haven't optimized yet. Calories in. Complaint reduced. Efficiency of the fueling process: low.

  Below me, the non-sapient fauna moved through the middle canopy in patterns I'd been cataloguing for two days. Clusters of rodent-adjacent animals — compact, six-legged, furred in mottled dark patterns — traveled the branch highways in loose groups that scattered the same way each time, reformed the same way, favored the same routes. They had structure. Structure implied things I could learn.

  They definitely weren't sapient aliens, scrapped beings like me. Or anything bordering on sapience. Their actions were too simplistic. Probably.

  Peering down, something catches my eye. A section of branch, maybe four meters long, that every group routed around. Consistently. No hesitation, no testing — they arced wide the way you'd walk around an open manhole. The branch looked identical to the wood on either side. Same bark. Same lichen. No visible hazard, no chemical trace my nose could identify.

  I filed the location and did not walk on it. Another variable I couldn't account for. The list was growing.

  The moon was gone.

  I hadn't noticed at first — the sky had been its usual wrong-colored gradient, the dawn bleeding orange through violet, my attention on the pitcher plants. But when I looked for the horizon marking, the pale disc with its branded symbol, it wasn't there.

  Not set. Not obscured. Absent. The sky felt emptier in a way I couldn't quantify. The symbol I'd filed with such precision — the circle, the geometric interior, the brand-on-skin permanence of it — was now a memory of a thing that might not be visible again. I didn't know if Verdanis had a regular lunar cycle or if the moon did something else entirely. The filing felt more inadequate now that the thing I'd mentally stored wasn't there.

  I did the math. Maybe sixty hours elapsed since the drop. Twelve hours until the translation matrix. Twelve hours until I could be something other than a monkey talking to constructs with pebble eyes.

  Time to move.

  — — —

  I heard it before I saw it.

  A bleat. High, sharp, unmistakable — the specific distress call of a goat, and the wrongness of it hit me like a slap. Three days of alien audio. Layered drones, wet chirps, insectoid clicking, sounds from body plans that had no Earth equivalent. And then: a goat.

  Earth animal. He had to assume every Earth animal on Verdanis was a person.

  I approached through the upper canopy, slow and high, staying in the shadow-channel between two massive trunks. My ears tracked the sound with involuntary precision, both rotating independently, triangulating. The bleat didn't repeat — one cry, then silence, the kind of silence that happens when something can't make sound anymore.

  I found a position on a wide secondary branch, twelve meters above a lower platform. Below me:

  A goat. Standing completely still. Not the stillness of an animal freezing in place — the stillness of something locked. Its legs were rigid mid-step, muscles visibly twitching at irregular intervals in the specific, desperate pattern of someone fighting against a body that won't respond. Paralysis. Forced. The twitching wasn't reflex — it was effort. Someone in there, trying to move, watching.

  And crouching in front of it: a bipedal alien, four-armed, scaled in a gradient from amber to pale cream. One raised hand still shimmered faintly blue — a skill, clearly a System skill, the same kind of mana-shimmer I'd seen activate in other sapients. This wasn't native fauna. This was a person from a destroyed world, wearing a body from their homeworld's catalog, same as me.

  The alien wasn't killing the goat. That was the thing that made everything harder.

  It was crouching. Studying. Tilting its head at one angle, then another, the way I'd circled the tracking plant — not predatory curiosity but scientific curiosity. It had stunned an alien animal to get a closer look. One hand reached toward the goat's face, two fingers extended, almost gentle.

  I did the math.

  Person from Earth, about to die. Whether the alien's curiosity turned lethal in thirty seconds or thirty minutes, the goat was paralyzed and defenseless and the outcome had one trajectory.

  Kill the alien. Predator 1 completes. Two more class levels — Level 5. A milestone. The phantom-limb absence of another skill that had been bothering me since the tracking plant would become a real skill I could actually choose. I could feel it.

  I should’ve made spears for the golems too. Fuck. I didn’t really have a chance though. Too many variables, too easy to die at night as a little monkey. I look back down and weigh my options.

  I had the tools. I had the position. Spring-loaded spear of dubious craftsmanship, two golems of marginal competence, twelve meters of height advantage, and the element of surprise.

  Three reasons. The moral one, the strategic one, the self-interested one. I held all three simultaneously and did not pretend two of them didn't exist. A structure can have multiple load paths and still hold. I'd established that. I was living in it now.

  The alien leaned closer to the goat. Not cruel. Curious. A person looking at a person it didn't recognize as a person.

  I committed.

  — — —

  The image transfer was new.

  I reached into the directory, pulled the filed visual of the alien — the one my capuchin eyes had captured with the crisp, permanent resolution the filing system provided — and pushed it into the golem command structure. Not clean. More like sliding a photograph under a door and hoping whatever was on the other side could read the outline. The golems received something — a target signature, approximate, good enough for bark constructs with pebble eyes.

  Command: drop toward that. Grasp. Hold.

  Half a second while the rudimentary logic chewed on something more complex than "walk to edge, reverse."

  The front golem dropped. Fifteen centimeters of bark and lichen, falling twelve meters, pebble eyes forward. It hit the alien's upper shoulder and grabbed — small bark hands locking onto the ridge between two scale plates with a grip strength that didn't know it was outmatched.

  The alien shrieked. High, alien, nothing from any sound library I'd ever accessed. It reached for the golem with two of its four hands.

  Second golem. Half-second later. Lower torso. More bark fingers grasping scale.

  The alien pivoted, all four arms flailing at the constructs clinging to it. Three seconds of distraction. Maybe less.

  I was already falling.

  The capuchin body handled the drop without my input — weight distributed across all contact points, tail reaching for purchase before my hands found it. All five of my limbs wrapped around the spear’s shaft as it fell, like a coiled serpent. I hit the alien's back between the shoulder ridges and the impact traveled through my knees, my spine, and a chest cavity that was not built for landing on things from above.

  Four kilograms on a creature that outweighed me by a factor I refused to calculate. The scale plating was smooth and warm under my feet. The alien bucked — one explosive twist — and my tail caught a ridge of armor and held while I braced the spear.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The nape. I'd planned this from the branch. Scales thinning where the skull met the spine — the stress point where two structural members join. Every joint has a weak point. This one was right in front of me.

  I drove the spear into the gap.

  Stone tip penetrated maybe a centimeter through scale. Resistance. Dense biological armor doing what armor does.

  Not enough.

  But the tip was in the gap, and the pressure was on the threshold, and the mechanism I'd built in a dark hollow because my hands needed something to do fired exactly as designed.

  Click. Vine parted. Spring cracked forward.

  The stone head drove four more centimeters into the junction between skull and spine.

  The alien jolted. Four arms splayed wide — fingers spread, rigid, the involuntary extension of a nervous system receiving a signal it couldn't process. The body dropped forward before the arms came down.

  It hit the branch. I went with it, still on its back, and the impact knocked the spear shaft from my hands and sent one golem tumbling off the alien's shoulder.

  Stillness.

  I was lying on the back of something that had stopped moving. The spear shaft lay on the bark beside us, headless — the stone still embedded in the nape. The mana draw from the spring was gone, spent, that line of warmth behind my sternum suddenly empty in a way that felt like exhaling a breath I'd been holding for a day and a half.

  One of the alien's four arms moved. Not a grab. Not defense. A slow, reaching gesture — fingers closing around nothing, the motion of someone trying to grasp something that wasn't there.

  Then it stopped. The fingers went slack.

  I looked at its face.

  The expression wasn't fear. Wasn't aggression. Confusion. The last thing in those scaled features was the look of someone who hadn't understood what just happened to them — a person dying puzzled rather than afraid, the curiosity still visible underneath the dying, like a question that had been interrupted mid-sentence.

  I watched it settle into nothing. I did not look away.

  — — —

  I slid off the body.

  My hands were shaking. Four kilograms of capuchin standing next to something I'd killed.

  The excitement hit first — a physical rush, adrenaline and achievement colliding in my chest with the engineering brain's version of triumph. I built a thing. The thing worked. The load path held. The tolerances held. The spring fired and the stone drove and the mechanism performed to specification and something was dead because of it.

  Then the other thing, and it didn't replace the excitement. It occupied the same space. Simultaneous. Same joint, two loads.

  That was a person from somewhere. Their world had been scrapped and they'd ended up here and spent days surviving and learning to use a paralysis skill and approaching an alien goat with scientific curiosity, and I'd killed them with a spring mechanism made of bark and mathematics.

  The excitement didn't go away. The horror didn't go away. They sat next to each other in my chest like two loads running through the same joint, and the joint was holding, barely, and I was not going to inspect the load capacity right now.

  Pressure behind my temples. Hard.

  — — —

  [QUEST COMPLETE: PREDATOR 1]

  Reward: +2 Class Levels

  +1 Skill Evolution Token LOCKED

  Class Level: 5

  [Notice: Higher Leveled Sapient Slain]

  Reward: +2 Trait Tokens LOCKED

  Utilize tokens at night during Upgrade Window

  — — —

  The levels settled into the warmth behind my sternum like the first ones had — a recalibration, deeper this time, restructuring something I didn't have a map for. Level 4 was a click, a threshold, a skill advancement I could feel waiting for allocation. Level 5 was more. A milestone. The directory expanded into new rooms I hadn't built — three distinct flavors of capability presenting themselves as potential, sitting in mental files that hadn't existed ten seconds ago. New skills. Choices.

  Behind that: a flood of encrypted data compressing itself into the directory — the alien's biological architecture downloading in dense, unreadable blocks. Trait schematic. Locked until sundown. And something else, more physical and drawn to the empty sockets of my skills and biology. The Trait and Skill Evolutions Tokens.

  I filed everything. All of it. Didn't open a single folder. Didn't allocate the advancement. Didn't look at the three skill options. My hands were shaking and there was blood on the bark in front of me and the alien's confused expression was sitting behind my eyes with the specific permanence of something that would not be filed no matter how much mana I threw at it.

  Later. Everything later.

  The goat was still paralyzed. One leg twitching. Starting, slowly, to regain control — the first voluntary movement visible in the trembling attempt to bend a knee.

  — — —

  Footsteps. Multiple. Heavy enough to transmit vibration through the branch and into my feet.

  Fast decision.

  I couldn't leave the goat next to a dead alien. A paralyzed Earth sapient beside a fresh kill was a scene that told a story, and I wanted to be the one telling it.

  I clicked at the golems. One was back upright, slightly askew from the fight, one arm bent at an angle that hadn't been in the original design. Together we nudged the goat toward a hollow in the nearest trunk — a gap in the bark wide enough for the goat's body, barely.

  The goat was heavy. Genuinely heavy — forty kilograms of locked muscle and panicked person and legs that were starting to unlock in the worst possible sequence. One golem pushed from behind. I pulled at the shoulder, four small hands doing work that should have required ten times the mass. The other golem walked into the goat's rear legs, fell over, got up, and attempted a second approach from a different angle that was equally unsuccessful.

  The goat bleated once — half-volume, the vocal cords still partially frozen — and the sound was the most human thing I'd heard in three days.

  We got it in. Dark, tight, the goat's breathing audible in the enclosed space. Its eyes rolled toward me with the expression of a person who had been paralyzed, nearly killed, rescued by a monkey with bark constructs, and dragged into a hole in a tree.

  I held up four fingers. Stay. I didn't know if the gesture meant anything to someone inside a goat but I held them up anyway.

  I climbed to a vantage above the hollow entrance and waited.

  Four Earth animals came through the canopy from the southeast, moving with human decision-making visible in every step. Systematic. Coordinated. Searching.

  A gorilla — maybe the same one from the first day, the one I'd seen staring at the wrong-colored sky with existential commitment. Moving slowly, methodically, the body language of someone who defaults to calm under pressure.

  A large cat. Tawny, low to the bark, moving in short bursts and stopping to assess. Surviving with speed and angles rather than mass. The energy of someone who had learned in three days that being fast and small beat being big and slow.

  A wolf, ranging wider than the others, checking approaches, circling back to confirm direction. Something about the movement pattern implied a specific competence — not just instinct, but training, some prior framework being applied to a body that wasn't built for it.

  A velociraptor. Smaller than the name suggested — still twice my size, feathered in colors too vivid and too structured, moving with quick, precise energy that had more kinetic potential than the others. The body of something built for explosive acceleration, inhabited by someone still calibrating what that meant.

  They were converging on this area. Following the sounds of the fight, or the goat's scent trail, or something my senses couldn't parse.

  I dropped down to the hollow entrance. Both golems flanking me. Pebble eyes forward.

  One capuchin monkey and two bark constructs, standing in front of a hole containing a goat.

  — — —

  They saw me. I saw them see me.

  I climbed three meters up — onto the branch above the hollow entrance, putting vertical distance between myself and anything that could grab me. Not fleeing. Not aggressive. Establishing position the way you establish the terms of a conversation before the conversation starts.

  The gorilla stopped first. Massive body going still, head tilting at an angle that was too analytical to be animal. Its gaze dropped to the golem standing guard at the hollow entrance — fifteen centimeters of bark and pebble eyes, oriented outward with the unwavering commitment of something that didn't know it was the size of a coffee mug.

  The gorilla's posture changed. Recognition. That construct was a skill. The monkey had a class.

  I gestured toward the hollow. Open hands — four-fingered, clumsy, universal. Pointed down. The goat is in there. Hands up, palms forward. Alive.

  The gorilla raised one massive fist, and the air shimmered around it. Mana. Visible, deliberate, offered as information. Force. Close-range. Direct.

  I raised my hands and made the golem walk forward, turn, walk back. Small. Mechanical. My thing.

  The cat blurred — a short burst, five meters in a half-second, arriving at the base of my branch and stopping. Showing, not threatening. Speed.

  The wolf extended one paw, held a pale sustained shimmer across it. Something continuous. Support.

  The velociraptor didn't demonstrate a skill. It just moved — three directions in rapid succession, feathers flaring, stopping with a precision that said the body was faster than its inhabitant had fully mapped. Still figuring it out. Still impressive.

  I tapped my throat. Shook my head. Pointed at them, at myself, then gestured toward where the sun would rise.

  Tomorrow. Talk then.

  The gorilla held my gaze. Five seconds. Ten. Then made a low sound that carried the cadence of agreement — not language, but close enough that the translation matrix would probably have something to work with in twelve hours.

  I pointed at the hollow. Take your friend.

  The wolf went in. Came out beside the goat, who was moving now — shakily, legs working in the uncertain, incremental way of a system coming back online after a hard reboot. The goat looked up at me. I couldn't parse the expression through species boundaries and wasn't sure I wanted to.

  They moved off. The velociraptor looked back twice — the kind of look that files a position and catalogs an asset.

  I stayed on my branch and watched until the canopy swallowed them.

  — — —

  The honest version of what I was feeling, I wanted to go with them.

  Not strategically. Not because of what they could offer or what I could leverage. Because I'd spent three days alone on branches building things out of bark and talking to constructs that stared back with pebble eyes, and five people were walking away from me who were all feeling the same things I was feeling in the same kind of wrong body, and I let them go.

  The reasoning was sound. Level 5 with a milestone I hadn't allocated, advancements I hadn't spent, a trait schematic locked until sundown, and a mana pool that had been running on fumes since I put a stone through someone's neck. I had nothing to contribute that would outweigh what I'd need. Tomorrow, with language and new skills and something worth bringing, I'd have a position. Not today.

  The right call.

  The right call felt exactly like the right call. That was the worst part — the logic was clean, the structure was sound, and the sound structure meant another night alone with the directory and the golems and the drawer where I kept the confused expression on a face that hadn't known it was about to stop being a face.

  I turned north.

  Higher canopy. Thinner branches. Toward the hollow where the materials were waiting and the levels sitting in the directory and the three skill choices I hadn't opened and the trait schematic that would unlock at sundown and the one question I couldn't file, which was whether the right call and the wrong feeling could occupy the same joint indefinitely or whether something would eventually give.

  My golems followed at my heels. One slightly askew from the fight. Both pebble-eyed, forward-facing, and completely incapable of the one thing I actually needed.

  I climbed. The sunset started behind me. I didn't look back.

  I had a long night ahead. It started with spending those levels, and finding my new skills.