Chapter 13: Horse Guy Energy

Andy spent the first three days of his equine existence falling over.

Not continuously. He fell over in discrete, individual incidents, each one a separate humiliation with its own character and flavor, and by the end of the third day he had compiled a taxonomy of falls that would have made a slapstick choreographer weep. There was the Forward Pitch (front legs stop, back legs don’t, face meets ground, horn stabs dirt). The Lateral Slide (all four hooves on wet moss, body goes sideways, dignity goes with it). The Overcorrection (lean too far right, correct too far left, repeat until horizontal). And his personal nemesis, the Standing Start Collapse, in which he would be standing perfectly still, balanced, stable, thinking about absolutely nothing, and then his left rear knee would buckle for no discernible reason and deposit him on his side like a large, horned, faintly glowing sack of incompetence. Thud.

The problem was proprioception. His internal body-mapping had been calibrated for a nine-centimeter frog and was now being asked to manage a forty-five-centimeter proto-horse. His legs periodically received instructions intended for a body that no longer existed. They responded incorrectly. Andy fell over.

His brain knew how to walk. Twenty-four years on two legs, several weeks on four. But the brain’s knowledge and the body’s execution were connected by a nervous system that was still laying cable. The result looked like it had been assembled from spare parts by someone who lost the instruction manual and decided to wing it.

“I am a horse,” Andy thought, lying on his side in a patch of clover with his three-toed hooves in the air and his stubby horn pressing into the soil, “in the same way that a tricycle is a motorcycle. The basic concept is there. The execution needs work.”

[XP: 3/1000]

Three. Three XP in three days. The economy of being a proto-horse was, to put it charitably, terrible. Insects were now too small to yield meaningful XP (the System awarded fractions for kills below his tier, and the fractions were insulting), and the larger prey were faster than him, or bigger than him, or both. Andy’s current combat capabilities could be summarized as “I can headbutt things, if I can reach them, if I don’t fall over first.”

The headbutting was, admittedly, more effective than it had any right to be. His neck was thicker, the muscles denser, and when he connected his horn with a target, thonk, the impact was substantial. The horn itself was harder than it had been in any previous form, dense and warm with life magic, and the golden-blue glow pulsed brighter on impact, as though the horn enjoyed being used. Andy filed that under “things I probably shouldn’t anthropomorphize but absolutely will.” His horn got excited when he thrust it into things. He was choosing not to examine that.

The real problem was mobility. A horse, even a dog-sized evolutionary rough draft of a horse, was designed to run, and Andy could not run. He could walk (wobblingly). He could trot (briefly, before his legs got confused about the sequencing). Running required a coordinated four-beat gait that his nervous system was still learning, and every attempt produced a lurching scramble that covered ground the way an avalanche covers ground: messily, loudly, and with no guarantee of where you would end up.

On the morning of the fourth day, his legs figured it out.

Andy woke in the shallow depression he had scraped out beneath a fallen log (barely wide enough for his body, absolutely not wide enough for his ego) and stood up. The standing was automatic. Smooth. His legs extended, his weight distributed, his balance found its center, and he was upright without thinking about being upright. The first time that had happened. The quiet, unmarked transition from conscious effort to unconscious competence, the kind of milestone the System didn’t track but that mattered more than the ones it did.

He walked out from under the log. The walking was automatic too. Left front, right rear, right front, left rear, the diagonal gait pattern clicking into place with the sudden, effortless rightness of a skill that crosses the threshold from learning to knowing. Andy walked across the forest floor without wobbling, without lurching, without thinking about his feet at all, and the satisfaction was entirely out of proportion to the act. He had been a cell and a jellyfish and a frog. Walking was something he had watched a fisherman do and envied and wanted. Now he was doing it, and it was, in its small and fundamental way, a triumph.

He walked faster. The faster walk became a trot, smooth, rhythmic, his body rising and falling with each stride in a pattern that his brain was merely supervising rather than micromanaging. Andy trotted across the forest floor and thought: oh. Oh, this is what it’s supposed to feel like.

Because the trot was good but not enough, because the body was offering something more, something that lived in the deeper muscles and the longer bones, Andy leaned into the acceleration and his legs shifted from trot to canter to something that was not yet a full gallop but was adjacent to one, and the world began to move.

The trees blurred. His equine eyes resolved individual leaves at twenty meters, but he was passing them, passing them with a speed that made them smear at the edges of his peripheral vision. The ground beneath his three-toed hooves was a continuous ribbon of brown and green, and the rhythm was not walking and was not trotting and was not quite running but was something close to it, something that tasted like running the way a preview tastes like the meal, and the taste was extraordinary.

[GALLOP: INITIATED]

[NOTE: GAIT COORDINATION IMPROVING. CURRENT EFFICIENCY: 43%. OPTIMAL EFFICIENCY REQUIRES PRACTICE.]

Forty-three percent. He was running at less than half efficiency and it was still the fastest he had moved in any body, in either life. His frog brain could not have imagined this speed. His human brain had forgotten it. His horse body was built for it.

He ran.

The forest opened ahead of him, the trees spacing wider, the canopy thinning enough to let morning sunlight reach the forest floor in broad, warm columns. Andy ran through the light and the shadow and the light again, his hooves finding purchase on soil and root and packed earth with a sureness that his three-toed feet shouldn’t have possessed this early but did, because running was what they were for, and purpose made things work.

He ran, and the horn on his forehead caught the sunlight and scattered it into golden-blue fragments that trailed behind him like a comet’s tail. The life magic pulsed warmer, brighter, feeding energy back into his muscles. He had a stamina bar now, a green metric alongside health and XP, and it was depleting slower than it should have been because the horn was augmenting his performance. His horn was literally making him last longer. The jokes wrote themselves and Andy was too happy to make them.

He ran through the forest with his horn glowing and his mane (bristly, ridiculous, a mohawk that stood straight up along his neck) streaming in the wind and thought: I am going to cry. I am a horse running through a forest and I am going to cry because I can run and I couldn’t run and now I can and it is the most beautiful thing I have ever done.

[XP: +5 (SPEED TRIAL: FIRST GALLOP)]

[XP: +3 (TERRAIN NAVIGATION: FOREST)]

[XP: 11/1000]

Speed trials. The System was awarding XP for running. The incentive structure was as clear as the note about the equine path’s horn compatibility: run, you idiot. You’re a horse. Run.

Andy ran until his stamina bar bottomed out, which took twelve minutes and covered over a kilometer (farther than his frog body could have traveled in a day), and then he stood in a clearing he had never visited before, breathing hard, sides heaving, legs trembling with the pleasant, used-up feeling of muscles that had done exactly what they were born to do.

He had a body that ran. He had a body that ate distance for breakfast and asked for seconds. A body that, for the first time since he died on a crosswalk in another world, felt like it was designed for something. At forty-three percent efficiency, already the most physically competent he had felt in four tiers of existence.

“I get it now,” he thought, standing in his clearing, his heart hammering, his horn warm, his body alive in every sense of the word. “I understand why horses run. Not because they’re scared. Not because they’re chasing something. Because the body wants to run the way lungs want to breathe. It’s not an activity. It’s what they ARE.”

He was going to run every day. He was going to run until his efficiency hit one hundred percent and the speed trials gave maximum XP and his gallop was the thing that made the forest move out of his way instead of the other way around.

He was going to be such a good horse.

“The proto-equine organism,” he narrated, because the nature documentary habit showed no signs of stopping, “having mastered the rudimentary mechanics of quadrupedal locomotion, has discovered the joy of speed. Note the elevated heart rate, the general air of self-satisfaction, and the persistent cranial erection that appears to enhance physical performance. The organism is choosing not to examine the implications of its horn making it faster, harder, and longer-lasting. Some metaphors are best left unexamined.”

[STAMINA REGENERATION: IN PROGRESS. ESTIMATED RECOVERY: 45 MINUTES.]

He rested. The clearing was quiet, shaded at the edges, sunlit in the center, and Andy stood (without falling) and let his stamina refill and his awareness expand into the forest.

The senses were remarkable. He could hear birds (or things like birds) and triangulate their position by rotating his ears independently, which was new and deeply weird. He could smell water somewhere to the northeast, downhill. He could feel vibrations of small organisms through the leaf litter via his hooves. The equine sensory package was a categorical upgrade that made his frog senses feel like a first draft.

He could see fifty shades of green. Literally. Each leaf a slightly different hue his color receptors distinguished. His ears rotated independently to build a three-dimensional audio map like a tactical display in a video game he would have paid sixty dollars for and then complained about on Reddit. His olfaction was tracking-grade, following chemical signatures through the forest like invisible trails painted on the air.

[ENHANCED SENSES: CALIBRATING. CURRENT ACUITY: 67% OF SPECIES POTENTIAL.]

Only sixty-seven percent. Two-thirds operational and already processing more data than he had in any previous body. Full calibration was going to make this body feel like a surveillance apparatus with legs.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

He explored the area, walking smoothly along a game trail toward the water his nose had found. The stream was small, clear, cold, and Andy drank from it with the natural, easy motion of lowering his head and letting his lips find the surface. The act was so simple and so horse that the affection he felt for this body bordered on absurd.

He was getting attached. This body ran. This body could cover ground. It had legs getting stronger every day, lungs capable of sustained effort, and a horn on its forehead that channeled life magic into everything and made it a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit harder. He was falling in love with his own body, which was either the healthiest or the most narcissistic thing he had ever done. This body was going somewhere. This body was the vehicle to unicorn, and the vehicle was good.

[NEW MECHANIC: HERD DYNAMICS]

[EQUINE-TYPE ORGANISMS RECEIVE SOCIAL XP BONUSES WHEN IN PROXIMITY TO MEMBERS OF THE SAME OR SIMILAR SPECIES.]

[PROXIMITY REQUIREMENTS: WITHIN 50 METERS. MINIMUM GROUP SIZE: 2.]

[HERD BOND LEVELS: ACQUAINTANCE → COMPANION → HERD → BONDED HERD.]

[CURRENT HERD STATUS: NONE. NO COMPATIBLE ORGANISMS DETECTED WITHIN RANGE.]

[SOCIAL XP BONUS: INACTIVE.]

Andy read the notification, read it again, and there it was: the familiar, specific frustration of a man whose build was being optimized for multiplayer and who was playing solo.

A social XP bonus. For equines. Requiring proximity to other equines. Of which there were exactly zero. He was a horse with a herd mechanic and no herd. In the grand tradition of the System giving him capabilities he couldn’t use (see: sexual reproduction, unlocked as a frog, compatible mates: zero; see also: his entire previous life), it was either motivation or a cosmic joke. The distinction was getting thinner by the tier.

“A herd bonus,” he thought, standing alone beside a stream, the only proto-equine in what he estimated was a very large radius. “I need a HERD. I am a horse the size of a golden retriever with a glowing horn and three toes on each foot and the System wants me to find OTHER HORSES and make FRIENDS. Where? Is there a horse store? Equine Tinder? Swipe right for proto-horses with compatible horn morphologies and a willingness to overlook my mohawk? My profile would say ‘glows in the dark, great stamina, always horny’ and it would be LITERALLY TRUE and I would STILL get zero matches.”

The System did not respond, because the System never responded to rhetorical questions, a policy that Andy was beginning to suspect existed specifically to preserve the System’s ability to ignore his best material.

The loneliness landed differently as a horse. As a frog, solitude had been philosophical. As a horse, it was physical, written into his nervous system as a persistent urge to look over his shoulder for herd members that did not exist. His body wanted company. Not conversation, not the comfort of being known, but the simpler, deeper way a social animal needs proximity: warmth, sound, the reassurance that the group is here and you are part of it.

He was designed for companionship and experiencing the absence of it. The design made the absence louder.

“Added to the list,” Andy thought, resuming his walk along the stream. “Things Andy Snodgrass needs: hands, a voice, a herd, a date, a Costco membership (retroactively), and a clear answer from the System about literally anything. Current progress: zero out of six. Unless you count the horn, which I always count, because the horn is the only thing that has never let me down.”

The horn pulsed warmly on his forehead, which was probably a coincidence and possibly a response and definitely the kind of ambiguity that the System specialized in.

He spent the rest of the morning exploring his new range (enormous compared to his frog territory, crossable in minutes instead of hours), mapping water sources with his nose, identifying game trails by scent, and cataloguing the forest’s inhabitants with the calculating attention of a gamer who needed nine hundred and eighty-nine more points.

The forest was populated. Not with equines, because the universe was committed to its bit, but with a diverse ecosystem that his senses identified and his XP requirements evaluated. Deer-analogs, slender quadrupeds approximately his size, faster than him (currently), not prey (yet). Rodent-sized things that froze when his hooves passed near them, their stress hormones sharp enough for him to literally smell fear, which was useful and unsettling in equal measure.

And predators. His nose read their territorial scent-markings like graffiti on a wall: this area belongs to something that eats meat. The signatures were old but persistent, and Andy mapped them with the careful attention of a prey animal that was also a predator that was also a former human being with opinions about risk management.

[XP: +2 (TERRAIN NAVIGATION: STREAM)]

[XP: +2 (EXPLORATION: NEW TERRITORY)]