Chapter 9: Frog Boy Problems

Gravity, it turned out, was a personal attack.

Andy had spent his entire second life in water, where “down” was a gentle suggestion and moving required about as much effort as thinking about moving. Water was forgiving. Water was supportive. Water never, not once, grabbed you by the full mass of your body and slammed you into the ground because you had the audacity to stand on a wet rock.

Gravity did that.

The first time Andy hauled himself onto shore (desperate forelimb scrambling, full-body flop, no witnesses, the rocks did not have opinions), the air hit his skin and gravity hit his bones and his body, which had been buoyant and graceful approximately four seconds ago, became the heaviest, clumsiest, most pathetically earthbound collection of tissue he had ever inhabited.

He weighed, by his best estimate, something comparable to a large mouse. In water, that weight had been nothing. On land, it was everything. His four legs, which had propelled him through the lake with reasonable competence, splayed outward under the unfamiliar load of having to actually support his body instead of merely steering it, and he lay on the rock in a belly-down sprawl that resembled less a functional organism and more a very ambitious pancake.

“I had tentacles and no bones,” he thought, his chin pressed against the wet stone and his limbs extended in four directions like a compass rose drawn by someone having a stroke, “and THAT was easier than this.”

His lungs, which had never been asked to do actual work, chose this moment to come online. The gills closed. The air sacs expanded for the first time, drawing in atmosphere that his brain processed as dirt and green things and a general quality of aliveness that water did not possess.

He could smell. Real smell, mediated by actual olfactory receptors, and the first thing he smelled on land was earth, wet and rich and organic, the accumulated output of a terrestrial ecosystem that had been operating above his head his entire aquatic life without him knowing.

The shore was rocky and mossy and populated by things that moved. Insects, or something like insects, crawling over surfaces with the confident efficiency of creatures that had figured out gravity a long time ago and found it entirely manageable.

Andy watched them with envy. Then with the calculating interest of a predator. Then he remembered the horn on his head and tried to stand up.

Standing up took seven attempts.

The first attempt ended with him rolling off the rock and splashing back into the lake. Embarrassing but at least familiar. The second through fourth attempts ended with various configurations of legs-wrong, balance-absent, and face-meeting-ground that he catalogued under “learning experiences” because calling them “failures” implied a dignity the situation did not support. The fifth attempt got him upright for approximately two seconds before his left hind leg slipped on moss and he performed an involuntary split that his hip joints were not designed for:

[MINOR INJURY: LEFT HIP FLEXOR. REGENERATION ACTIVE. ESTIMATED RECOVERY: 3 HOURS.]

“Three hours to recover from doing the splits on a mossy rock. My previous body could survive being charged through an amoeba. This body can’t handle moss.”

The sixth attempt was better. He locked his front legs first, then his rear, and held the position with the trembling, full-body concentration of a yoga student in their first plank pose. He was standing. Sort of. His posture suggested “creature that has been recently assembled from parts and is not entirely sure how they connect,” but he was vertical, and vertical was progress, and progress was the only metric that mattered.

The seventh attempt added walking.

Walking was harder than standing the way juggling was harder than holding. Lift one leg, keep the other three stable, place it down, shift weight, repeat. He had walked on two legs for twenty-four years and been quite good at it. Four was spectacularly defeating him.

But the horn helped.

When he leaned too far forward, the horn’s tip touched the ground before his face did, like a built-in kickstand. When he listed to one side, its weight provided a corrective pull. Graceless, and absolutely not how the horn was supposed to be used. But his face hit the ground significantly less often than it would have without the horn, and for that he was grateful.

“My horn is a training wheel,” he thought, picking his way across the shore like someone crossing an icy parking lot in dress shoes. “My rare six-tier evolutionary horn is being used as a walking stick by a frog that can’t figure out legs. This is the equivalent of using a legendary weapon as a doorstop. This is fine.”

* * *

The shore ecosystem was richer than anything Andy had experienced in the water.

In the lake, life had been a limited palette. The shore was staggeringly, almost offensively complex. Plants grew upward with a purposeful verticality that made Andy, who had recently been horizontal on a mossy rock wondering if he would ever stand again, vaguely jealous. Insects crawled and flew and buzzed. The moss itself teemed with microscopic life.

The hunting was excellent.

Insects were the perfect prey for a nine-centimeter amphibian with a horn and a grudge against gravity. Small enough to kill with a single strike, numerous enough for consistent XP, and too stupid to learn from the deaths of their peers. Andy could crouch beside a mossy rock, legs tucked in the default frog squat, and wait for insects to wander within horn range.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The horn was devastating on land. In the water, it had been a piercing weapon. Against the chitinous exoskeletons of insect-analogs, it was a battering ram. One good head-thrust driven by his new neck muscles and the carapace cracked open with a satisfying crunch. The insides were… well, they were bug guts, but they were nutritious bug guts.

He was headbutting insects to death. Just really going at it. Full commitment, forehead-first, like the world’s angriest frog doing the world’s most violent headbang. Thonk. Crunch. Dead bug.

“The horned amphibian,” he narrated, perched on his rock with the remains of a beetle-analog stuck to his horn like a grotesque hood ornament, “has adapted remarkably to its terrestrial environment. Note the use of the cranial horn as a primary hunting instrument, a behavior unique among amphibian species and deeply weird to observe from the inside. The horn, which the organism’s internal monologue has taken to calling ‘Old Pointy,’ serves as both weapon and utensil, piercing prey and then conveniently holding the remains in place for consumption like the world’s most disgusting kebab. Efficiency. Elegance. Absolutely no dignity whatsoever.”

[XP: 43/500]

The horn was also useful for digging. The shore’s substrate was soft enough that the horn could penetrate and lever it aside. He used it to unearth burrowing organisms (worm-analogs, grub-analogs, things that were surprised and unhappy to be evicted by a glowing horn poking through their ceiling), to create resting depressions, and, on one memorable occasion, to wedge open a stubbornly sealed mollusk-analog like the world’s most primitive oyster shucker.

The horn was becoming integral. Weapon, yes, and the System’s mysterious rare trait chain, yes, but also a functional, practical, everyday tool for eating, moving, and manipulating his environment. He woke up with it, hunted with it, used it as a kickstand, a shovel, a kebab skewer, and a nightlight. It was, in the most literal sense, the most useful part of his body. He was becoming very attached to his horn, and he was aware of the Freudian implications, and he did not care.

[HORN (AMPHIBIAN): GROWING. TRAIT CHAIN: 3 TIERS. KEEP GOING.]