"People look at me like I'm a little strange, when I go around talking to squirrels and rabbits and stuff. That's ok. That's just ok." -- Bob Ross

  My quiet introspection was interrupted by the sense of an incursion into my territory. It was an odd sensation, but one I was getting used to. The disruption of the mana flows coalesced into what I knew was one of the local ground squirrels, edging carefully into my domain and creeping towards the tunnel entrance.

  Objectively, it was kind of a cute, little thing – maybe 20 cm head to tail with dark stripes breaking up the dun base coat along its back. Its tail was twitching in what I interpreted as nervousness, and it paused repeatedly to sniff and scan for danger, before suddenly darting towards the tunnel.

  It paused, briefly, as it crossed the entryway – I'm guessing to let its eyes adapt to the darkness and to cast about for potential predators. Apparently finding nothing, it moved cautiously down the tunnel – now bigger and smoother than when they had all first fled the vicinity.

  I wondered why it had come back. It seemed clear enough to me that the squirrels and other creatures were aware of my presence and had no desire to be within range of my appetite. Yet this one had returned, nervously or not.

  Hey little guy. Looking for something? Want to be my little buddy?

  I felt a little silly trying to talk to the ground squirrel, and in any event, there was no evidence that it heard me speaking to it in my mind. Possibly it was ignoring me, but I assumed that the squirrel had no telepathic ability, and, apparently, I didn’t either.

  After a few more seconds, the critter hit the side path where the ground squirrel pup had been abandoned. I guessed that maybe this was that one’s mother, and it had come back for it after all.

  It cast about in an agitated manner, sniffing all corners of the small space quickly, and realizing that the pup was no longer present. It let out a brief keening note and the hair along its spine fluffed up into a small crest. It headed back to the main tunnel, but didn’t turn towards the entrance – instead, looking in the direction of the core room.

  It occurred to me, rather abruptly, that I had no real defenses in place against an agitated ground squirrel. My self-image, I guess, had not yet internalized my new shape, and so I hadn’t been concerned about the threat of small rodents. That said, I was currently small enough to fit in this rodent’s cheek pouch and had what I assumed to be fairly low durability.

  The squirrel let out another series of loud squeaks; I interpreted these as an enraged call to battle, as five more squirrels came rushing to her support. That struck me as odd for a small prey species, but I didn’t have much time to ponder the error of my ways or my assumptions about appropriate animal behavior.

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  They swarmed down the tunnel in a fuzzy stampede. As a full-sized human, it likely would have been adorable; as a 1 cm crystal, it was borderline terrifying.

  They flooded into the core chamber, pouring out of the tunnel mouth in an avalanche of scratching claws and nibbling teeth. Their weight was insufficient to trigger my trap, and I set it off manually, but before that happened the leader and two of her friends had crossed the mouth of the pit. The three bringing up the rear did fall into the pit, but I had no idea if the fall would hurt them or how quickly they might get back out.

  The leader quickly scaled the granite stand I had left myself but was temporarily baffled by the box I had grown for defensive purposes. I seized on this opportunity to first seal the trapped ground squirrels into the pit by restoring the thin trigger plate. They might still be able to escape, but not in any rapid timeframe. The other two squirrels were milling below the pedestal, and I quickly cored out a 1-meter square sheet of granite from the ceiling (about 10 cm thick) - dropping it on them without warning. The drop and the weight was enough to end them, with a rather messy squelching noise.

  The last ground squirrel wasn’t wasting any time, though, and she launched herself from the lip of the box directly at me, claws outstretched and mouth open wide. There was a moment of sheer panic as her teeth clamped down on my core, grating across the smooth surface with a distressing vibration.

  In a reflex of raw shock and anger, I released my remaining stored energy directly into her skull – the power arcing in a static shock, somewhat larger than a spark, and smaller than a lightning bolt. I had a sudden flash of memory, back to my high school science days and experiments with a Van der Graaf generator. The ground squirrel’s muscles locked up briefly, before her smoking corpse pitched backwards, vacating its bowels before falling to the floor in a boneless heap.

  I took stock of my situation briefly as the shock faded. I could sense no damage to my core crystal, and my durability remained unchanged. I wasn’t sure if the ground squirrel’s bite simply wasn’t hard enough, or if she had missed a key fracture plane, or simply wasn’t capable of damaging a magical stone, but I was relieved to find myself unscathed, if temporarily depleted of energy.

  As my energy began to come back, I started tidying up the aftermath of my battle. For the first time, I was pleased to no longer have a sense of smell, as I assumed ruptured squirrel and the steaming pile of feces mere centimeters away would have been unpleasant – literally at a visceral level.

  I used matter conversion to absorb the corpses first, followed by the feces and the fallen stone. There was no leveling involved, though I did note my hunger had receded and both my mana and energy rose notably faster than my base regeneration rate. I was a bit torn at that – pleased that slaughtering things wasn’t the obvious way to advance but feeling a bit cheated at the same time.

  Of course, they’re just squirrels. Who knows if a bigger danger would have bigger rewards?

  I didn’t have any real issue with self-defense in this scenario, even if I hadn’t enjoyed the process. It did leave me questioning what to do with the three trapped creatures, however. In the end, I decided to offer them assimilation; I wasn’t about to set them free to attack again, but if they wanted to come work for me, I could make use of them easily enough.

  Assimilation Refused: Cliffrun Ground Squirrels do not accept

  I supposed that the level of hostility was too great to get past. I resorbed the spikes at the bottom of the trap, bulked up the trap cover plate, then dropped it on the vicious little vermin. Another quick rush of energy and mana ensued, and I used it to reset my trap and scrub the air clean of any stray remnants.