Chapter 12: A Fork in the Road

The five-hundredth experience point arrived courtesy of a beetle the size of Andy’s fist (his frog fist, not impressive by human standards but perfectly adequate for punching beetles, a sentence he never thought he’d think). Thonk. Dead. The evolution notification arrived with the corpse.

[XP: 500/500]

[TIER 4 EVOLUTION AVAILABLE!]

[CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE REACHED THE THRESHOLD FOR TIER 4 EVOLUTION.]

He dragged the beetle’s remains into the shade of a fern (this was his fourth tier evolution and he had learned that the restructuring process left him vulnerable; shade and cover first, existential deliberation second) and settled into a crouch to read the options.

[TIER 4 EVOLUTION: COMPLEX ORGANISM (ADVANCED)]

[YOU WILL TRANSITION FROM A SIMPLE MULTICELLULAR ORGANISM TO AN ADVANCED COMPLEX ORGANISM. FULL ORGAN SYSTEMS. ENHANCED SENSORY CAPABILITIES. SIGNIFICANT SIZE INCREASE.]

[CHOOSE YOUR BODY TYPE:]

[1. CANINE-TYPE] – Quadrupedal mammal. Pack-oriented. Exceptional olfaction and hearing. High endurance. Opens paths toward: Wolves, Dire fauna, Canid spirits. Social XP bonuses with pack members.

[2. FELINE-TYPE] – Quadrupedal mammal. Solitary hunter. Exceptional reflexes and night vision. Burst speed. Opens paths toward: Great cats, Shadow fauna, Feline spirits. Stealth XP bonuses.

[3. EQUINE-TYPE] – Quadrupedal mammal. Herd-oriented. Exceptional speed and stamina. Large body frame. Opens paths toward: Horses, Magical beasts, Equine megafauna. Endurance XP bonuses. NOTE: THIS PATH IS COMPATIBLE WITH HORN MORPHOLOGY TRAIT CHAIN.]

[4. CERVINE-TYPE] – Quadrupedal mammal. Forest-oriented. Exceptional agility and sensory awareness. Antler development. Opens paths toward: Deer, Stag spirits, Forest guardians. Terrain navigation XP bonuses.]

Andy read the options once.

He read them twice.

He read the third option, the equine path, a third time, with the specific, focused attention of a man who has been reading between the lines of a mystery novel for three hundred pages and has just arrived at the chapter where the detective says “it was the butler all along” except the butler was a calcium spike and the detective was a frog.

NOTE: THIS PATH IS COMPATIBLE WITH HORN MORPHOLOGY TRAIT CHAIN.

Compatible. The System had never been this direct. This was not a breadcrumb. This was a neon sign. This was the System pointing at the equine option and saying: this one.

Horse. Horses with horns were…

Andy sat very still on the forest floor, and the full picture assembled itself with the clean, inevitable click of a puzzle’s final piece.

He was going to be a unicorn.

The calcium spike he’d picked as a bacterium. The horn chain he’d nursed through three tiers. All of it, every pointy choice, had been building toward this. Horn plus horse equals unicorn.

“The System flagged it COMPATIBLE,” Andy thought, with the giddy, slightly unhinged energy of a man who has just discovered that the lottery ticket he used as a bookmark is worth eleven million dollars. “The most famous virgin animal in mythology. For the reincarnated virgin. The System is either the greatest game designer of all time or the cruelest comedian, and honestly it might be both.”

He needed to calm down. He was a frog having a revelation under a fern and his horn was pulsing with golden-blue light in response to his emotional state (that was new; life magic reacting to strong emotions) and the light was going to attract predators. Deep breaths. Or whatever the frog equivalent was.

“Horses,” he thought, and then: “magical beasts,” and then: “equine megafauna,” and then, because the thought was irresistible: “unicorn.”

The canine path was fine. The feline path was elegant. The cervine path had antlers, which were horns in a different font. But the System had specifically flagged equine as compatible with his horn chain, and ignoring a flag was the kind of decision that got you killed in video games and in crosswalks.

Andy selected Equine-Type. Obviously. He had been selecting Equine-Type since he was a bacterium. He just hadn’t known it yet.

[EQUINE-TYPE: SELECTED]

[HORN MORPHOLOGY TRAIT CHAIN: COMPATIBLE. TRANSFERRING.]

[INITIATING TIER 4 EVOLUTION…]

[WARNING: SIGNIFICANT BODY PLAN CHANGES. ESTIMATED SIZE INCREASE: 400-600%. FULL MAMMALIAN ORGAN SYSTEMS DEVELOPING. THIS PROCESS MAY BE DISORIENTING.]

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Four hundred to six hundred percent. From a nine-centimeter frog to something approaching half a meter. The size of a small dog. Not the size of a horse, but “proto-equine” was presumably the starting configuration.

He was going to have hooves. A mane. The body plan of a creature designed to run, and Andy had not run since the body that got hit by a truck. The prospect of speed, of the ground passing beneath legs built for it, made his amphibian form tremble.

The restructuring began, and it was the biggest jump yet.

His limbs elongated. His torso stretched. His skull reshaped around his brain (which was growing too, thoughts getting sharper in real-time like a screen’s resolution increasing while you watched). His skin thickened, developed a coat of short, coarse hair. His gills sealed shut for the final time. He was a land creature now. The water was behind him.

His toes fused. Three on each foot, the digits merging into something between a hoof and a claw, the early equine compromise that would eventually become proper hooves. His tail grew, thin and bony, and would later (hopefully) become the flowing tail of an actual horse. For now it looked like a rat tail attached to a barrel, and Andy was choosing not to think about it.

And the horn.