GAAAAAAAAH!!! I'm so bored. I've been wandering for what's felt like hours in these tunnels without encountering a single thing. Why!? This is supposed to be monster-infested cave territory! Where are my bags of XP!? The only silver lining is that my tunnel sense skill is working quite well and has kept me from getting lost so far. That and I've managed to figure out a bit more about this system thing.

It seems that with my skills there are two ways to go about leveling them up. The sow and steady cheapskate way and the fast and splurging way. The first is where you slowly level them up through usage and save your skill points for purchasing new skills in the process. Then there's the splurging way where you just spend skill points to level up your skills faster but then you run out of them really quick. I'm not sure why someone would design a system like this since it seems like it wouldn't be worthwhile to have two different ways of doing the same thing. It's counterintuitive. I think that's the right word for it. I'm not sure I never was good at my language arts class.

Now there's been a few interesting things I have also noticed on my journey. Now, what might that be you ask? Signs of battle I say. Every once in awhile I'll find small gashes on the walls, floors, and ceiling as if a fight took place. The scary thing is that despite this there weren't any corpses or any signs of a battle taking place other than those gashes and the occasional few drops of sticky clear bug blood.

….

Wait I've been talking to myself this whole time. Am I going crazy!? Is the isolation getting to me!? It hasn't even been a single day yet!... I think. I'm not even sure how long it has been. So much for my sense of time. Must've been lost when I was moved into the body of a flower. Anyways back to the important stuff. I've been trying to search around for something to kill to get to my level up because I'm not that far from it but unfortunately, I haven't found any and that's probably thanks to whatever's been making all those gashes.

I had a hunch that it might have been those ants. I wasn't sure if they were capable of making gashes in walls, but I knew that there were species of ants like army ants which were so ravenous that they'd devour everything in the areas before moving on. Something suspiciously similar to what was happening here. And if that was the case it only solidified my belief that I needed to earn more XP for a level up before things got too crazy for me to handle. So, I continued my hunt for prey.

It was a long while later when I finally found my first monster. And it was not something I was sure I could handle. It was a rat. A lone rat that had what seemed to be bony bumps sticking out of its spine, lower jaw, and out of the side of all of its ankles. Almost like it was trying to pretend it was an ankylosaurus. This rat was injured though with its entire left flank coated in a congealed layer of dark red blood. It was also wheezing and limping forward towards my end of the tunnel.

Turning around I prepared to run away from the approaching rat before hesitating. Yeah, this rat was easily two or three times my size but it's the only monster I've seen in a while. There was no guarantee I'd find another before whatever's been eating all the other monsters gets me. Not only that but this monster was wounded and looked like it was on its last leg. It was having trouble breathing and walking for crying out loud! Am I seriously threatened by that!?

Yes. Yes, I am. But I had to face reality. This was perhaps my only chance at getting enough XP to level up. Steeling my mind, I turned around and looked at the approaching monster rat. I've been using my stealth skill the entire time I was mentally debating fighting this gargantuan thing. So, it hasn't caught on to my presence yet. This rat even wounded was undoubtedly stronger than me, but I still had a few advantages like my messy eater perk and the drowsy pollen skill. With the two of those and it being wounded, I should be able to defeat it. I hope.

I kept absolutely still on the top of the cave ceiling not allowing even a single leaf to tremble in my desperation to remain hidden. When the rat finally made it under me, I struck falling from the ceiling and then it hit me. I instinctively twisted my body in a way to lessen the force my landing would have upon me and slammed into the shoulder of the rat barely avoiding the bumps on its spine. The rat didn't even flinch when I landed, and I wasn't that affected either. It really was convenient being a flower when falling. Before it had a chance to react, I opened up my petals and buried my teeth into its already wounded side and started using my chainsaw teeth to shred it. Skin, fur, flesh. It didn't matter what it was anything my teeth encountered tore it to bloody ribbons.

The rat squealed in pain and vigorously shook itself throwing me off of it. Standing myself back up I faced it ready to continue the fight. The oversized rodent, however, was staggering with a shocking amount of blood pouring from its wound. What was more surprising is that instead of pain and fear for its life-dominating its eyes all that was there was pure unfiltered rage.

I think I pissed him off.

"SCREEEEEE!"

Yup. I pissed it off.

Opening up my petals I shot out a small cloud into the rat's face and it started sneezing.

Hey, stop sneezing! That's my drowsy pollen you disrespectful ball of reviling fur! Not sneezy pollen!

The rat began to wobble a bit as blood loss and my drowsy pollens began to have an effect on it. Just not enough of one. The rat charged forward jaws snapping and claws swinging wildly as it attempted to tear me apart. But its movements were slowed by the severe wounds and drowsy pollen allowing me to bend and twist my body in a series of crazy manners narrowly dodging the larger monsters' attacks. I kept taking steps back with my roots trying to get some distance between us, but the rat refused to allow me my personal space as it took a step closer for every step I took back.

Finally having enough of this damnable rat onslaught, I waited till it finished one of its swipes before diving forward before it had the chance to attack again and buried my mouth into its neck. I then began to chainsaw my way through its stringy flesh and a large amount of blood-soaked my petals. The rat reared up onto its legs shaking its legs and grabbing me by my stem and pulling me as it attempted to dislodge me from its throat. This however made it worse as its flesh tore apart from the force of its pull and my toxic thorns stabbed at its paws. The rat made one last gurgle before it collapsed.

Right on top of me.

[Armored rat slain (Tier-0 monster). 3 skill points awarded. New species killed 1 additional skill point earned. A total of 5 XP earned. Monster core absorbed. 3 mutation points earned. 3 mana absorbed.]

While I am currently uncomfortably squished underneath this behemoth of a rat, I'm rather satisfied with the amount of XP I managed to get from this fella. Even if he was wounded it wasn't exactly easy killing him when I'm just a glass cannon build. I started to wiggle myself out from under the rat and after several tries and getting my thorns stuck on the rat's hair and flesh, I managed to get myself out.

Now that I killed him and have enough XP to level up again, I should take the moment to chow down on this guy before heading out somewhere to rest and level up. With that in mind, I began to gorge myself on the flesh of the rat and after several petal-fulls, I felt full. Now finished with my meal I went out in search of a good spot to make safe for me.

Before I could get very far, I heard the light tapping of something walking coming from the way I came. Curiously I turned to look that way despite no longer needing to turn to look at stuff. Force of habit from my human days I suppose. But back to the taps. They were growing loud. In the few seconds I was musing to myself the taps increased to a loud thumping that echoed in the empty tunnels. I started to mentally squint towards the other side of the tunnel as I began to see movement along the edges of my vision. It looked like a big blob… A big moving red blob that was getting closer…

Ah… Fuck I'm doomed.

The red blob that I was seeing became clearer within moments and I could see now that they were ants. Tens of dozens of them at just the edge alone. Worst of all instead of marching on just the bottom along the floor they were climbing on every available bit of space in the tunnel covering it in a layer of red emotionless ants. So thick were their numbers that they started resorting to walking along on top of each other turning what started out as a swarm of ants into what looked like a red moving living tsunami of mandibles and black compound eyes.

The moment they spotted the corpse of the armored rat I killed their speed picked up and they doggy piled it and tore it apart (I kid you not) in seconds. That was more than enough to tell me my earlier assumption was right. Leveling up could wait. Right now, I need to make like a tree and leaf! Like ten minutes ago!

As I started sprinting down the tunnel like a six-legged devil (Which is sort of true) was on my tail I heard a deafening chorus of clacking mandibles and the thumping of hundreds of insect legs as the ant tsunami started to chase me.

Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck! I'm doomed this time! No coming back to life this time! No escape! How do I escape!? Barricade myself in a tunnel and run? No, no ants dig faster than me. I wouldn't buy much time with that. If anything, that would waste time. I can't climb anywhere since ants can also climb. Even if I was several levels higher there's too many of them for me to kill. Damn it why the hell are these ants so OP!? Go chase some other poor flower you bastards!

I turned my head around running and shot off the last drowsy pollen left in the tank before continuing my sprint. It probably wouldn't buy me much time but at this point every second counts. After nearly a minute of running (I counted. I counted in an attempt of distracting myself from my fear. It failed.) I arrived at an opening in the tunnel I purposefully avoided in my exploration due to it being a larger place.

This time however I practically threw myself into there. I found myself in a large opening in the cave tunnels. This room looked big and had several bison monsters (Bastard flower killers!) a dozen scorpions as well as numerous rats. I didn't pay them any mind nor the details of the cave as I ran. Several of the monsters in the room had their hungry eyes drawn to me when I ran in but when a few seconds later hundreds of ants started to pour out of the way I came they promptly joined me in running in fear. It seems like even the bison monsters don't want to tangle with hundreds of ants. Can't blame them.

With me being stuck in front of the various monsters leading my very own multispecies stampede we were all forced up one of the larger tunnels. Despite it being large enough to fit several bison beasts it was still cramped for all the dozens of monsters. As our stampede continued to run, we picked up new members along the way as the ran ahead of us not wanting to be trampled to death by us while we ran in fear of being eaten alive by the ants swarming behind us. Based off of the occasional pained roar and screech the ants were catching up and picking us off one by one.

This seriously felt like some messed up horror with how we were being chased by death incarnate helpless to do anything except for run to prolong our seemingly inevitable deaths. Already I was beginning to tire and slow. Which was the last thing I wanted in this situation. But as if I had my very own dues ex Machina helping me, I saw a small pinprick of daylight up ahead. It was faint but it was there. And where there was daylight there was the surface.

Spurred on by the sight of freedom I forced my exhausted roots to speed up as I raced towards the exit passing up the monsters in front of me as my body swelled up with energy. Towards my freedom! Towards the beautiful sun! It seemed I wasn't the only one excited at the prospect of getting out to the surface as all the other monsters whether they were exhausted or full of energy sped in their eagerness to survive. With their extra speed and me keeping just barely ahead of them we managed to pull away from the ants putting a good amount of distance between us. Take that six-legged killing machines! Just as the exit was, I sight however I was it by a mixture of confusing emotions at what I saw.

Confusion. Happiness. Nervousness. Shyness. (Yes, A rose feeling shy. Deal with it.) Fear.

There were five humans in chainmail armor wielding swords, spears, and axes. One of which had a wood staff. The human's expressions were filled with terror at the sight of the monster stampede barreling towards them. Instead of standing their ground to fend off the hoard of monsters like some suicidal idiots they turned and ran out of the cave entrance as they faded into shadows in the light. Then the light was starting to be blocked off as a thick wood gate was being used to block off the entrance to the cave. Trying to leave us to be eaten in here you bastards!? I shall not allow this! Not that I have the power to stop it. But my big friends here do!

I jumped onto one of the bison monster's legs and climbed up onto its back. The gate was imposing with it being made of entire whole trees but in the face of the tens of dozens of monsters with me riding a bison monster flanked by bison monsters in the lead were not cowed. More specifically the bison monsters weren't cowed! The bisons lowered their heads pointing their horns towards the gate and slammed into it at full speed. Unlike how I expected it to hold against their assault it broke into pieces that barely stayed together under the combined attack of several bison beasts. But that didn't remain so for long as the monsters behind us slammed into the bison's nearly causing me to fall off of the one, I was riding. The gate wasn't so lucky as it collapsed outwards under the full strength of dozens of monsters. I and the other monsters flooded out of the cave the glare of the light blinding me temporarily before my mana sense got adjusted to my new environment.

Where I found myself was what looked like a small town. There was a couple dozen people wearing armor and wielding weapons who were staring at them in disbelief. But it wasn't them where my attention was drawn to. Children. Women. Elderly. There were many defenseless people present. Both monster and man froze for the briefest of moments staring at each other before an enraged scream pierced the air.