I debated what to do next. I could move faster alone, but didn’t want to leave the girls alone. Every minute I waited, the huntress was getting farther away.


    I made the command decision. “I’m going after her. You two, get up into the tree. I’ll leave you two with the rifles, and I’ll take the pistol and the multitool. I should be fine.”


    “What?” Billie shrieked. “You can’t leave us. What if you die? What if another giant fucking snake like eats you? If you die, Sid Marshall, I will kill you!”


    I laughed. “I’m not going to die. I have too much to live for.”


    Billie calmed down a little, but tears were still on her face. “It’s because you love this.”


    Anger threatened to take me over. I fought to keep calm. “That’s the wrong word. I don’t love this. You two get up the in the tree, now. If anything comes, you have the rifles, and you yell as loud as you can. I’ll be right back.”


    Then I was jogging through the ferns underneath the towering trees.


    “Opal, give my suit some camouflage.” Raising an arm, the fabric went from light gray to various colors of green.


    Following her trail was easy, yet I couldn’t go as fast as I wanted. I had plenty of energy, and yes, I could turn on the speed, but my control wasn’t so great. I didn’t want to accidentally sprint into a tree.


    At least all the spiderwebs were gone. It took a bit when I realized I was following a trail that was part trail and part road. Wait, was that broken asphalt under all the tree litter? I crouched down and brushed away some soil to find very old pavement with even some chipped yellow paint. When had the Ravana Storm dropped that down? It seemed like something from earth, though the mushroom trees were definitely not from my planet.


    And the redwoods were wrong. Maybe it was a version of my earth?


    Big three-toed footprints marked up the mud. I had found the main avenue the monsters had used to come through the redwoods. It was also probably why the huntress had chosen to bring the meat this way.


    She’d been in a hurry, so she didn’t try and hide her footprints.


    Then, I came to an abrupt halt. I found remnants of the rope, and then, some blood and muscle.


    She had abandoned the meat. But why?


    Only one reason.


    Suddenly, out in the open, I felt very exposed.


    Overhead, cloud cover threw shadows everywhere, and I stopped to listen. I didn’t hear a sound at first, not even the wind through the tops of the trees. Then I heard cawing in the distance, from those big crows we’d eaten the night before.


    Then. Breathing.


    The Tyrannous Rex came charging out of the trees and onto the road. It had been waiting for me, and If I’d have taken ten more steps, it would’ve snapped me up.


    The thing was different shades of green, like my own camouflage. It didn’t have scales though, more like armor, thick plates that gave it a rough, textured appearance. It was almost like it was wearing a helmet on its reptilian face.


    Wait. The armor didn’t look like its skin. Was it wearing armor? That begged the question—who had made the armor for his massive beast the size of a greyhound bus. It had a long tail behind, snaking out from between its enormous feet with claws like swords. More like daggers, the talons on its three fingers were attached to surprisingly muscular and long arms. Those claws would completely shred me if I gave the thing the chance.


    Most of the time, though, the armored T. rex probably used its mouth to kill its prey. It had a mouth like a woodchipper.


    It came forward, roaring. This was the monster we’d heard the night before. Holy shit, but this thing was enormous. Yeah, part of me was shitting my pants. Another part was loving the fact that I was seeing a dinosaur in real life.


    I loved dinosaurs.


    It was one thing to see them in books. In real life? It was a different deal. The smell of the thing was a mixture of mold, bad breath, and rotting meat. The stink hit me like a hammer. It also reminded me that I didn’t want to die being chewed up in the thing’s stinky maw.


    There was no way I was going to go toe-to-toe with the thing.


    Running, however, would only get me eaten. I whipped out my Weeper X15 and fired right into the back of its mouth. The plasma lit up its maw, so I had a great view of its teeth, fangs the color of amber against the red of its gums.


    It let out a roar of pure agony but that wasn’t going to stop it.


    No, but luckily, the adrenaline surge gave me an extra boost of power. My muscles glowed as I dodged it, and then, not quite thinking, I raced up the muscles of its powerful legs.


    The bright green stuff covering it was some kind of hard fungi.


    Now I’d seen everything—a T. rex with mushroom armor. What the fuck?If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    I sped up the hard ridges and then I leapt off it, landing on half-buried pavement. I wasn’t there a second before another T. rex came storming out, only this one was covered with a black fungus. It angled its head to gobble me up, but I was able to duck away, and then I was running, my quads like twin suns under the fabric of my survival suit.


    A third T. rex stormed out, this one bigger than all the rest. It too had the fungal armor, only this one was white. It snapped at me once, twice, three times, and I came within inches of being a tasty little snack for the big beasts.


    I dove and landed in a somersault, but my momentum carried me back to my feet. I had not planned that. The adrenaline was the likely culprit.


    For whatever reason, I immediately had names for them all. Jack was the white one, Reggie was the black one, and Green Albert was the dead one because as a rule of thumb, you should never eat plasma.


    I ran and leapt about a hundred yards and landed in ferns before stumbling. Bouncing into a tree, I was on my back, groaning and trying to breathe, though I couldn’t. I’d had the wind knocked out of me.


    With my diaphragm spasming, I managed to turn over onto my belly. I lay there, gasping, clawing at the soil. That’s when I noticed a huge red crystal, the biggest I’d ever seen, lying under some dried grass.


    Yes!


    I reached for it, and like magic, it ripped itself out of the yellow underbrush and flew right into my hand, where it disappeared.


    Opal was happy!


    <<<>>>


    Anomalous energy source detected! Utilizing. Charged to 8% of full.


    Evaluation speed increased by 33%.


    Results of evaluation pending…


    <<<>>>


    Opal’s battery had jumped nearly five percentage points, which meant bigger crystals had more energy. We weren’t at that magical ten percent yet, but we were getting there. I simply had to live a bit longer.


    I got up, ready to fight. But neither Jack nor Reggie were coming for me.


    The ferns dripped water on me, and I was a little chilly, since the sun had moved behind the clouds. My survival suit changed to better camouflage me. Was that why the T. rexes weren’t chasing me down?


    I caught the whiff of a swamp. There was murky water somewhere close.


    Then I heard crunching and slurping and belching.


    I crept through the ferns and peaked out.


    Jack, the white one, was currently feasting on Green Albert’s head while Reggie, the black one, was chewing on the dead dinosaur’s long tail meat. Reggie slowly ate his way up to get to the haunches, but then Jack snapped at him, clearly telling Reggie to back the fuck off.


    I watched in wonder, my inner ten-year-old thrilled beyond belief.


    These weren’t just dinosaurs, they were Tyrannosaurus Rexes, arguably the biggest, the baddest, and the best, and I was seeing them in real life, feeding off one of their own.


    It was a good choice. I was a bony little chicken wing compared to the twenty-two-ounce Porterhouse steak lying dead on the forest floor.


    Near me, the Rainforest World ended, and the Dinosaur Swamps began. In the far distance, above the treetops, a volcano was spewing lava down its slope. Between me and the volcano was a jungle of huge alien plants and black water and…more dinosaurs. The old name came to me at first…brontosauruses. No, that was the name of a species that didn’t exactly exist anymore, since there was a mistake in reconstructing the skeleton. Another kind of dinosaur had been named first, and that was the name the scientists went with.


    “Those are Apatosauruses,” I whispered. They were far away, but I could see their long necks reaching up to pull whole limbs off trees that bore a resemblance to the Louisiana bald cypress.


    There were all kinds of plant life, though, from huge flowering vines to massive trees with big flat leaves. It was an alien world, all right, but it seemed like the dinosaurs had found a way to live and thrive there.


    I stayed in the ferns of the Rainforest World to get a closer look, and soon I was standing on soggy ground. Not ten feet from me was a walkway, made from wooden planks, suspending over the water. Those weren’t natural, but manmade like something you’d find at a national park to keep tourists from getting their feet wet.


    Long serpentine shapes swished through the black water under that walkway. They looked far bigger than crocodiles. I had to remind myself they might be giant freshwater squid for all I knew. This was an alien patchwork world, after all, stitched together by the Ravana Storm.


    But who had made the walkway? It didn’t look old—fresh sap oozed out of the sawed-off edges of the wood. The planks had been awed off recently.


    I’d told the girls that I’d only wanted to catch the huntress and retrieve our meat. However, I couldn’t resist the mystery of that wooden walkway. Turning, I saw that a trail had been cut through the forest, which would’ve led to the main avenue where Jack and Reggie were currently feasting on Green Albert.


    I had a minute, and most likely, once the T. rexes finished eating Albert, they wouldn’t be hungry for a while.


    The walkway held my weight, swaying a bit, ropes creaking. I could see where the rope supports were tried around spikes driven into the trees. Pistol in hand, I slowly walked across the planks. Above me, the sky had a strange orange tint to it, with a bright yellow sun shining through the haze. A single crescent moon hung on the horizon. Looking up and seeing the line in the sky, orange on one side and blue on the other made me smile.


    Billie had accused me of enjoying this. Fuck, I was trying not to but come on! I was in the middle of a dinosaur world, and I’d just seen real T. rexes and Apatosauruses with my own eyes.


    The fun didn’t end there. I was exploring a mysterious walkway, venturing into the unknown, with an Arkadian Quantum Universal Intelligence Assistant that still had a charge.


    I came to an intersection. To the left, the walkway took me to solid ground. To the right, the path snaked around more trees and disappeared into thick foliage, where vines hung down from mossy trees.


    There was no way I was going to trust those vines.


    Dryland would feel good under my feet.


    Still, I could feel the time ticking by. While the Dinosaur Swamps seemed to have plenty of day left, the light was fading in the Rainforest World. At least now I had a trail I could follow back, so I wouldn’t get lost.


    Stepping off the walkway, I crouched to examine the stakes that had been driven into the ground. They were huge, with a big metal ring at the top—that was where the ropes were tied to.


    I shivered. The iron looked freshly forged. This walkway wasn’t old, unlike the pavement under all the leaf litter in the Rainforest World.


    The trail cut through foliage, and I followed it through trees. Thorny weeds tugged at me, and I heard my survival suit rip. After pulling myself free, I watched as the fabric knit itself together.


    I ended up using my ax to cut a path because I didn’t like any of the greenery touching me. We had poison oak around Grand Junction. It wasn’t that common, but the itching had nearly killed me.


    Sweaty and tired, I was getting thirsty. I might have optimized cells, but I still needed to stay hydrated. Not bringing water with me was stupid, and there was no way I was going to go near that swamp water.


    I was about to turn around, but then the end of the path.


    A black obelisk rose up from the ground, dwarfed by the tall trees around it.


    I felt a dull thrumming in the air, like standing under power lines. Then I heard it, a deep buzzing, that set my teeth on edge.


    It was like the air around the obelisk was crackling with energy.


    There was no way I was going to walk away from such a mystery. Curiosity might’ve killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back.