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.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  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.]

  Andy stared at the notification. Read it twice. Read it a third time to make sure he wasn't hallucinating.

  "Keep going," he repeated. "The System said 'keep going.' Not 'query not recognized.' Not 'choose wisely.' Not its usual bureaucratic nothing-speak. 'Keep going.' That's encouragement. That's the System cheering me on. That's either the most motivating thing that's happened to me since I died or the most ominous, and I genuinely cannot tell which."

  The System did not elaborate. But it had said "keep going," and Andy chose to hear it as a promise.

  * * *

  The other amphibians avoided him.

  He had noticed this early. As his territory expanded and he met more of the shore's amphibian population, the avoidance became unmistakable. It was specific to him.

  They saw the horn. None of them had anything like it. He was the weird frog. The horny frog. The frog with a glowing party hat made of bone.

  "At every stage of my existence," he thought, watching a group of frog-analogs hop away from him with a haste that was flattering and lonely in equal measure, "the universe finds a new way to make this joke. Horny cell. Horny jellyfish. Horny frog. The punchline keeps landing and I'm the only one in the audience." He paused. "Also, they're literally running away from me. This is basically my high school prom all over again, except I have a better body. Arguably. Debatably. At least this body has a weapon."

  The loneliness was a minor note, quickly submerged beneath hunting and XP. But it was there. Not the loneliness of being alone, but of being the only one who knew what alone meant.

  He filed it away. Shelved beside the grief and the Megan memories and the green signal and all the other things better addressed by forward momentum than by standing still.

  [XP: 87/500]

  Because the System's comedic timing was, Andy was increasingly convinced, fully intentional:

  [NEW MECHANIC UNLOCKED AT TIER 3]

  [SEXUAL REPRODUCTION: AVAILABLE]

  [YOUR ORGANISM HAS DEVELOPED REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS COMPATIBLE WITH SEXUAL REPRODUCTION. MATING WITH A COMPATIBLE ORGANISM OF THE SAME OR SIMILAR SPECIES WILL PRODUCE OFFSPRING WITH COMBINED GENETIC TRAITS.]

  [NOTE: OFFSPRING FROM SEXUAL REPRODUCTION MAY INHERIT EVOLVED TRAITS INCLUDING HORN MORPHOLOGY.]

  [COMPATIBILITY SCAN: NO COMPATIBLE MATES DETECTED IN CURRENT RANGE.]

  Andy stared at the notification for a long time.

  Sexual reproduction. Available. His frog body had developed the biological machinery for sex.

  He was a frog. With a horn. Who couldn't find a mate within range. The universe had given him the equipment and no one to use it on. Again. This was literally the truck situation all over again except instead of a condom in his pocket it was reproductive organs he couldn't use and instead of a crosswalk it was a mossy rock and instead of Megan it was NOBODY because he was a FROG.

  Classic.

  "NOW?" he said, to the System, to the sky, to the general concept of fairness. "You unlock sexual reproduction NOW? When I'm a FROG? After I died a virgin on the way to stop being a virgin and spent three tiers as organisms that reproduced by SPLITTING IN HALF? You're doing this on PURPOSE."

  [QUERY NOT RECOGNIZED.]

  "Oh, NOW it's 'query not recognized.' When you want to encourage me you say 'keep going' but when I accuse you of trolling me it's back to 'query not recognized.' You have a personality. You have a SENSE OF HUMOR. And when I'm a unicorn, I'm going to find whoever built you and I'm going to have WORDS."

  The System said nothing.

  Andy sat on his rock, a horned frog with unlocked but unusable reproductive capabilities and a glowing horn and a grudge against the fundamental architecture of reality, and watched the sun set over the lake.

  He could see the sunset. Blurry, low-resolution, a smear of warm colors bleeding across his visual field as the light dipped below the horizon. The first sunset of this life, and it was beautiful in the way that only something temporary, observed by a creature that understands impermanence, can be.

  He watched it. The horn glowed on his head. Somewhere in the distance, over the water, a shadow moved against the fading sky.

  The aerial predator. Still out there. Still fishing. Still a mystery.

  Andy would meet it eventually. He was sure of that the way he was sure of the unicorn path and the horn chain: not with evidence, but with the stubborn certainty of a man who had picked a calcium spike when he was a bacterium and ridden it through three tiers and intended to ride it through three more.

  The sunset faded. The stars came out. Andy saw stars for the first time, tiny points of light in a dark expanse, and felt small and determined and very, very horny in every possible meaning of the word.

  He had a horn on his head and reproductive organs he couldn't use and a glowing forehead and a rare trait chain and he was sleeping alone on a rock. The most armed virgin in evolutionary history.

  Tomorrow, he would hunt.