Your bug has a brain of its own. Every fight it survives — and every fight you drive it through — leaves a mark. The learned behaviors panel in the lobby is that mark made legible: a list of the tactics your bug actually reaches for, and how good it has got at each one.
This page explains all fifty-two of them: what each one is, when your bug will try it, and what you can do to make it try it more often.
A bug is not a difficulty setting. It carries a private set of weights — one row per behavior — scored against what it can see right now: how far away you are, who is hurt, whose legs are missing, who is winding up, who is on the glass, how long the fight has run, and what species it is looking at. When a situation comes up, every behavior gets a vote weighted by how well that choice has worked in situations that felt like this one before.
There are three ways the weights move.
Whenever your bug is under AI control — practice bots, or your own bug fighting while you watch — it picks its moves through those weights, and the jar answers. Choices that were followed by something good get reinforced. Choices followed by something bad get pushed down.
When you drive, the bug is still taking notes. Your button stream is read against the same list of behaviors, several times a second: back away while they bleed and that is venom kiting; swing at a spider still recovering from a miss and that is punish the whiff. Those get filed exactly like the bug's own choices — only they count 1.5×, because a demonstration is worth more than a guess. Habits rub off on their own; results are what make them stick.
With Advanced Training (a one-time unlock in the store), you can call for a behavior mid-fight. In any match where you are a fighter, press G — or on a phone, tap the 📣 button by your right thumb — and the coach ring rises over the jar. Tap anywhere outside it (or ESC) to fold it away.
The ring has two arcs. The top arc holds emotes — the wave every jumper knows, plus whatever specialty poses this bug has equipped — and works whether you or the AI is driving. The bottom arc holds orders: pick one and your bug favors that behavior for the next eight seconds or so. Orders need the bug to be fighting under AI control — when you hold the keys, you are the plan.
An order is an ask, not a remote control. When you give one, it arms for about eight seconds; your bug performs it at the first moment the move is physically possible. Your call overrides the bug's mood — a timid bug will throw the display you ask for, a stubborn one will break off and lick its wounds — but never the physics: cooldowns, stamina, range and footing still rule. That is why obedience is sometimes a breath late (the moment had to arrive), and why an order can quietly fail (the moment never came). The event feed always tells you which:
One more rule: a new order replaces the old one. If you call for a leap and then call for a heal two seconds later, the leap is off — your bug holds one instruction at a time, like any good student.
Credit lands on whatever your bug was doing in the last couple of seconds, and it fades with age — full credit under 0.6s, half under 1.2s, a quarter under 2.5s, nothing after that. So the reward attaches to the choice that actually set the moment up.
| what happened | credit | to whom |
|---|---|---|
| your strike lands | +2 per damage | you gain it, they lose the same |
| you sever a leg | +40 | a leg is a lesson |
| your silk connects | +24 | the caster |
| your venom is ticking | up to +24 | kiting choices only |
| you heal while clear and resting | up to +24 | wound-licking and wall-climbing only |
| you brace and it blocks | +2 per damage stopped | bracing only |
| their attack hits nothing | +12 | dodging and cone discipline only |
| you wrench out of a pincer or a mantis's arms | +14 | the escape |
| your pincer closes on a leg | +10 | the grab |
| a mantis's forelegs close on the whole animal | +16 | the capture |
Several rewards are deliberately narrow: healing only pays the choices that bought the clearance, and a whiffed strike only pays a dodge. Otherwise every bug would learn that standing still is great, because good things sometimes happen while you stand still.
| what you see | what it means |
|---|---|
| 7/10 | Proficiency. How practised this behavior is, 0 to 10. It rises on successful uses, not attempts. |
| 214x | Uses. How many times the bug has committed to it. Holding a behavior across several moments — a long retreat, a held spacing — counts once, not fifty times. |
| +1 | Growth. Proficiency gained in the fight that just ended. The event feed calls out the top three. |
| — | Never used. The behavior exists; this bug has not reached for it yet. |
Hover a row in-game for the full line: what the behavior is, how many times it has been used, and the share of those uses that paid off.
Proficiency climbs steeply and then hardens. A signature behavior — one your bug leans on every fight — reaches 4/10 around 50 matches, 8/10 around 200, and mastery at 10/10 somewhere near 275. Behaviors it rarely picks idle at 0–3 forever, which is the point: the shape of the list is your bug's personality, and no two veterans look alike.
REFLEX imperative survival — it always
happens, it is not a choice, but it is still counted.
TEACHABLE your driving demonstrates it.
OWN FIGHTS only discovered by fighting under AI
control. PINCER needs claws — the
scorpion's pincers or the mantis's raptorial arms — and the two
stinging moves among them need a scorpion's tail as well.
COILER needs a bug that can wrap one —
the centipede, and nothing else on the roster yet.
LEAPER needs a bug that can leave the ground —
jumping spiders only.
RAPTOR needs folded arms that strike in one
plane and lunge in their own shape — the praying mantis.
WIDOW needs a bite that latches, combs on the
hind feet and a venom that seizes — the black widow.
TARANTULA needs an abdomen furred with
stinging hairs and the hind legs to kick them off — the tarantula.
BRUTE needs front legs that end in stone
spikes — the brute spider.
RHINO needs horns to lift with and wings under
its wing cases — the rhinoceros beetle.
VELVET needs a gaster that swings to sting in
every direction — the velvet ant (and the tenrec).
Down to two legs, a bug cannot walk — it drags its belly along the ground and keeps going. This one is never gambled on: if it is crawling, it is crawling. It still appears in the panel, because how much of its life a bug has spent as a crawler says something about it.
Turning tail outright. Cheap in pride, expensive to get wrong — a bug that runs from a foe who is also running turns the fight into a stalemate, and running from a healthy hunter just gives them your back.
Breaking off deliberately to let the blood stop — and then being still about it. Rest is the medicine: wounds only close on a bug that is holding still with its breath back. Walking mends at a crack of the rate, sprinting not at all, and a winded bug must first stand and recover stamina before anything closes. Turning in place to keep the foe in view counts as rest — so a bug can settle anywhere it feels covered: on the ground, up the glass, on a stick, behind a stone. The healing itself still asks to be genuinely clear — well out of reach, out of combat for a few seconds — and venom keeps the wound open: while poison ticks there is no calm and nothing closes, so a poisoned bug must escape and let the venom burn out before licking anything. Each round grants a finite pool, so this buys a comeback, not immortality.
The wall version of licking wounds: go up where a ground-bound pursuer has to commit to the climb, and bleed the clock while healing. Cheeky, and genuinely hard to punish.
Pinned against the glass, a bug can panic straight into it. This is the alternative: run the curve of the jar instead of the wall itself and come out with the floor back.
A scorpion's claw holds a leg for over three seconds — long enough to sting you at leisure. Tearing loose costs a chunk of that leg but cuts the hold to about a second. Any species learns this one; you only need to be the one getting grabbed.
Rest closes wounds, and rest goes better where the other bug cannot simply walk up and end it. A hurt bug with healing left heads for the near side of a stone or a fallen log — the side away from the foe — and settles there, so anything that wants it has to come round. It only counts furniture big enough to stand behind, on this side of the foe, and a short run away.
A bug with no wind cannot strike, dodge or run. Wind only comes back to a bug that is not sprinting or bracing, so when it is nearly gone the clever answer is a few steps back and a moment of standing still, face on, rather than the last swing it can afford.
Every strike mauls whichever live leg it lands nearest. So a bug with a leg nearly off stands at an angle to the fight, the sore side turned away and the sound side offered, and keeps that angle as the other bug moves. It costs a little reach and saves a leg.
The opposite lesson to trade through. Behind on health, its weapon loaded and yours not, a swap of blows is one you lose — so step out of reach and make it come again when you are ready. Which of the two a bug learns is its character.
A claw on your leg, two forelegs round your body, fangs latched in — and the head of the thing doing it is right there. Wrenching free costs wind; biting it costs a bite, hurts it, and every bite that lands tears most of a second off its hold. The aggressive answer, and the one that ends a hold fastest when the fangs are ready. (Not in a beetle’s horns, which lift you clear of anything to bite, and not in a coil, whose own two answers are below.)
Wrapped in a centipede’s coil, any direction you hold tears at it — seconds off the hold, paid for in your own wind, and less of a tear for more of the wind once it is drawn tight. So the time to fight it is early, with the wind to do it and most of the hold still to come. Your fangs answer from inside either way, where the coil has not smothered them.
The other answer to the coil. Holding nothing lies still and spends nothing on the struggle, and the coil’s fever burns wind either way — so a bug whose wind is going, or whose hold is nearly done, waits it out and keeps what it has for the moment it is free.
The whole body rears before a strike, and a web takes a moment to gather at the spinnerets. Both are visible. Stepping off the line during that moment is the cheapest defence in the game — it costs nothing but position.
Crouch and take it. You lose the exchange on paper and win it in practice, because a braced hit does a fraction of its damage and leaves them recovering right in front of you.
A pounce is a straight line, and it only exists while their stamina and cooldown allow it. Standing in that line with their gun loaded is how bugs die. This is the habit of noticing, and stepping out of it.
A tarantula’s hairs hang in the air where it kicked them, and every second spent standing in them costs wind and speed. This is the habit of noticing the haze and walking out of it — or, for a bold bug with the tarantula in reach, of deciding to finish it there instead.
A threat display weakens your bites for a few seconds. Giving ground until it lapses is the honest answer — and against a bug that actually has the health to back the display up, the correct one.
Every missed strike ends in a recovery the attacker cannot cancel. That window is the single most reliable free damage in the jar, and good bugs live in it.
Subtler than punishing a whiff: their pounce is on cooldown or their stamina is gone, so for a few seconds they simply cannot answer a committed attack. Walking in during that gap is safe in a way it never is otherwise.
They are winding up; instead of dodging or bracing, you swing too. Both land. Whether that is brave or stupid depends entirely on who has the health to spend — and a bold bug finds out either way.
A bug held by silk, or reduced to crawling, cannot get away from you. This is the instinct to drop everything and cash that in before it wears off.
A displaying bug is rooted. If you read the display as fear rather than dominance, charging it is free damage on a target that cannot move — and it cancels the display outright.
Damage pools per leg, and a leg that has taken enough comes off for good. Rather than spreading damage around, this returns to the leg already hanging — and unlike health, a lost leg does not come back inside the fight. Each one costs them about 7% of their pace; at three legs they can no longer sprint at all and move at half speed; at two they are down to a crawl.
An animal on its last scrap of health is one landed hit from the end. The careful habits — respecting a loaded pounce, skirting its cone — are for a fight that is still going, and this one nearly is not. Run in and finish it.
A leap cannot be steered and a landing cannot be dodged out of. The moment a jumping spider comes down, or a beetle sets down out of the air, it is rooted for a beat — and a bug standing ready is there first.
Whatever turned it — a chase, a cast, another target, a rider on its back — an animal facing away cannot answer what it cannot see. A bug that notices goes in.
A landed strike staggers for a moment, and the fangs are usually still loaded when the pounce has spent itself. The follow-up is the second hit that goes in before the first one has been answered.
The other answer to a landed hit: leave before the reply comes. A bug with the longer reach, the quicker legs or the colder head takes the damage it dealt and gives none back.
A bug thrown on its back — a beetle’s horns, a hard landing — has to right itself before it can do anything at all. Nothing it owns can answer in that time.
The default state of a competent bug: sit at the edge of reach, threaten nothing, commit to nothing, and wait for them to make the first mistake. It is the most-used behavior on most veterans' panels.
You are ahead on health. Every second that passes is a second you win, so there is no reason on earth to walk into their range — make them solve the problem.
You need to close, but walking up the middle of a loaded pounce is suicide. So approach on a diagonal — arriving from outside the line they are aiming down.
Give ground to invite a committed chase, then turn and meet it. Rare, and devastating when it reads correctly — the whole plan lives or dies on whether they actually take the bait.
Stay just close enough to seem worth attacking, just far enough that every attack misses. An exhausted bug cannot pounce, cannot bite well, and cannot escape — so the fight is decided before you have thrown a punch.
Not closing, not leaving: walking round the other bug at the edge of its reach with the face kept on it, so that its turn is always a beat behind and sooner or later its side comes round. When its weapon is loaded and you are in its line, the cone and the flank are the better answers; this is the rest of the time.
The bug in the middle of the jar can go anywhere; the bug against the glass can go half as many ways. When the other one has drifted to the edge, walk to the middle and let it come from there.
Just outside its reach, with its weapon loaded: a quick step in and straight back out. A bug that bites at the step has thrown its strike at empty air — and a strike that misses is the window punish the whiff lives in.
It is coming in fast and nothing of yours is ready. Backing off with the face still on it buys the moment your weapons need — and unlike breaking to run, it never shows the rush a back.
An animal against the glass can only leave along it or through you. Come in on the line from the middle of the jar and every way out passes your fangs; strike when it is in reach.
No cleverness at all: sprint at them and arrive. Against a trapper still gathering silk, or anyone who wanted more room than you are giving them, blunt works.
The committed version, on its own cooldown: a genuine run-up that ends in a body slam. It knocks bugs around rather than cutting them — a ram is blunt and never takes a leg off — but it moves them where you want them.
Something is beside you, and turning to face it takes time you do not have. So hit it with the legs already pointing that way. Less damage than a proper bite, available instantly.
Rear up on your back legs and make yourself enormous. A foe caught inside the cone hits noticeably softer for the next few seconds. The catch: displaying roots you in place, so a bug that calls it walks in free. Bugs display to press an advantage, to bluff when hurt, and to buy back stamina.
Decided once a fight, at the start: straight across the jar at a run and into it, before it has settled. Against a trapper still placing silk, or a bug that likes to take its time, the first hit is half the fight.
A hurt animal backing off is an animal looking for a rest it needs. Sprint after it, aimed at where it is going, and do not let it have one.
An animal moving across you is never where it was. Aim at where it will be and the circle it is walking closes on you instead of carrying it away.
Lead with silk. A connected web pins several legs at once — the bug is not frozen, but it is slowed badly and every step costs it. Everything you want to do afterwards gets easier.
Silk is far better spent on a bug that has nowhere to go. Waiting for them to put their own back to the glass, and only then casting, is the difference between a web and a trap.
Once venom is in them it does not need your help. Disengaging and staying disengaged means the poison collects its damage for free — and a poisoned bug cannot heal, so every second you refuse the fight is a second they cannot afford.
Losing, or hurt, with something running at you — and you spin. A snare thrown into a charge stops the charge where it is. The answer silk has to a pursuer, and the spider’s best way out of a fight going wrong.
Venom keeps a wound open and eats health while it lasts, and then it is gone. A pounce lands a fresh dose; landed just before the old one runs out, it keeps the animal poisoned the whole fight instead of in patches.
Venom kiting taken vertical: land the poison, then take the glass, where following you is expensive and the venom keeps working regardless.
Climb, stop, and wait. A bug on the wall above you is genuinely awkward to deal with — and it is choosing the moment the fight restarts.
The payoff of the perch. Launch off the wall onto a bug beneath you and the fall itself is added to the blow — roughly a tenth more damage per unit of height dropped, up to a considerable bonus from the rim. The most spectacular thing a bug can learn.
The answer to everything above. Hit a bug that is holding the glass and its grip fails — it slips, falls, and arrives at the bottom having lost the entire plan it climbed up for.
A scorpion fights with equipment a spider does not have, so it has tactics a spider will never show. These slots simply never fire for a spider — the same way a scorpion never casts silk. A praying mantis owns the two clamp moves here too — its snatch is a claw that holds — but it has no tail, so the two stings stay dark for it. The one exception is wrench free, above: any bug can learn that, because any bug can get caught.
The claw closes on a leg and keeps it for over three seconds. This is the scorpion's web: no silk involved, same result — a bug that is not going anywhere while you decide what to do about it. A mantis does the same with its snatch, from further out.
What the claw is for. A held bug cannot dodge, and the tail comes over the top at leisure. The whole body rears for a moment before the whip, though, which is the one warning the victim gets.
A claw on a leg is a leash. Back away and the held animal comes too, on three legs and its fourth in your claw — off the line it was on, away from the stone it was using, out onto ground you chose.
Every hold ends. Brace and the claw or the forelegs let go when you say, not when the clock does — and an animal that was just let go is still finding its feet when the strike that was waiting arrives. A claw-holder’s hand on its own hold, the way it always was on a coil and a beetle’s horns.
Less dramatic than the sting and often better: chew on the leg you are already holding. Slightly weaker than a clean bite, but it renews the grip as it goes — and it is aimed squarely at a limb you are trying to take off.
Rather than one committed strike, a burst of quick jabs. Chosen at the moment the sting resolves — you do not aim it, your scorpion decides whether this is a flurry sort of moment.
A jumping spider does not lunge across a gap — it jumps it. Its pounce puts the whole animal in the air on a solved arc, and it hits with everything it weighs. These slots never fire for a bug that cannot leave the ground, the same way a jumping spider never casts silk: it hunts by sight and spins a dragline, not a snare.
The signature. From several body-lengths out it crouches, aims, and throws itself onto the other bug in a fast, flat dart — and the further it flew, the harder it lands. Watch for the silk: a real jumping spider anchors a dragline before every takeoff, and the thread trailing the flight is why the landing is clean instead of a tumble. The crouch is a real tell and the arc cannot be steered once it is in the air: a leap read early is a leap dodged, and a leap dodged leaves the jumper standing in the open with its pounce spent.
Backing away on eight legs is slow and easy to read. A leaper can simply not be there any more — one jump and there is a body-length of clear air where it was standing. It costs the same pounce, so a bug that escapes this way has nothing loaded when it lands.
You can do this yourself: hold back and press pounce, and the leap goes the other way. Cornered against the glass it shortens rather than refusing — being backed up costs you distance, not the move.
The salticid hunt: get something under your feet and arrive from above. The bug picks a log or boulder crown near where the foe is working, checks the whole flight path is clear — a jump steepens to sail over furniture, it never threads through it — and takes the perch in one throw. As the fight drifts it will jump stick to stick rather than come back down. Long jumps are real: at full effort the arc spans the jar.
What the perch was for. A foe that wanders under the stick meets the whole animal arriving from above — the same height bonus the drop-lunge earns, on a bug that chose the spot in advance. The counter is the same as ever: the crouch is the tell, and a target that moves during it is a target the leap misses.
How a real jumping spider crosses open ground at prey: a quick dart while the target looks away, and a dead stop the moment it turns — motion is what eyes catch, and a stone that was somehow nearer each time is on you before it reads as a threat. The bug closes in scurry bursts and holds utterly still whenever the foe is facing it.
A straight approach walks straight up a loaded pounce cone. The weave trades a little distance for a bearing that never settles — each side-step drags the foe's aim across its own body, and the last cut arrives off the line it was watching.
The perch is worth more than the chase. A bug that has the crown keeps it — squared up on the foe below, refusing the ground, letting the drop do the arriving. Paired with the perch jump and the ambush, this is the whole king-of-the-hill game.
The sidestep, played with the animal's one great gift. A committed strike cannot turn; a bug that is simply somewhere else when it lands has spent a jump and nothing more. Unlike the desperate escape leap this is a healthy bug's answer — lateral, short, and already facing back.
A centipede's pounce is not a lunge, it is a wrap. It rears the front third of itself, throws its body around the other bug, and holds. Nothing else in the jar can do it and a centipede can do almost nothing else — it is slow, it turns badly, and it has to be close enough to touch. These slots never fire for a bug with no coil in it, the same way the silk slots never fire for a scorpion.
The whole animal commits. While it holds, the other bug cannot walk and the venom stacks — but the centipede cannot walk either, and it is holding its own head next to a working mouth. The rear-and-arc is a tell like any other wind-up: a bug that moves while it is happening is a bug the wrap misses.
Where the wrap closes decides the exchange. Over the front of the animal — a spider's fangs, a scorpion's tail base — and its big move is smothered for as long as the hold lasts. Closed anywhere else, you have wound yourself around something that can still answer. This is aimed, not lucky.
Holding costs wind every second and neither animal catches its breath inside a wrap, so a hold is a contest of stamina rather than a timer. Riding one out is the patient answer: let the fever do the work and take the hits it costs you.
The other answer. A wrap that closed badly is a free hit for the other bug, and the centipede is rooted for as long as it insists. Letting go costs the hold and the cooldown and buys back the ability to move.
The forcipules are a modified first pair of legs, not jaws, and they hang under the head. The strike arches the front third and drives them down and in: shorter and faster than a fang lunge, and much lower than a sting.
A centipede is a third the girth of a house spider. Gaps between the stones and under the sticks that everything else has to go around are simply a route, and a bug that takes one has bought distance nobody can chase through.
A centipede is nearly blind and reads the world through its antennae. It stops and sweeps them at the mouth of a gap before it goes in — which is real biology, and also the second's warning that tells you where it is about to be.
Twenty-eight legs mean losing one barely matters, and the plates down the back are the hardest thing on the animal. A strike it cannot dodge, it turns into.
A mantis is built around reach: the arms land a full body-length out, where nothing else on the roster can touch it back. The snatch is the lunge thrown from that edge instead of from fang range — the animal using the one thing it has that the others don't.
An ambush hunter does not close distance; it lets distance close. A bug that is not moving is a bug the other one has stopped reading, and the moment they cross into reach the snatch is waiting.
Fixed eyes read depth by moving the head, which is why a real mantis sways before it strikes. In the jar the rock does that and one thing more: a bearing that never settles is a bearing a pounce cannot line up on.
Not the threat display, which wants room and a calm foe. This is the deimatic flash — wings and fans open in the face of something already on top of a hurt mantis, to buy the half-second of hesitation that the arms need.
Spacing, but at the arms' reach rather than the poke band every other bug holds: step back inside it, step in outside it. Held well, the arms are the only weapon in the jar that lands.
Not a leg this time. Both forelegs are thrown together, spread wide to bracket a body, and whatever they close on is brought in to the mandibles and held there — rooted, scrabbling, and chewed with a bite that cannot miss. It holds only a moment, less whatever the animal tears off it by struggling, and it runs on its own clock. The throw has a longer cock than the snatch, and a miss leaves both arms out.
A widow’s bite does not let go. When it lands her fangs stay in, her longest legs close round the animal, and she hangs on while it drags her — and every press of the bite drives them deeper and sends another dose of latrotoxin down them. The venom does not take blood; it takes the legs. Hang on long enough and the animal seizes.
A comb-footed spider does not cast a snare across the jar; it tips its abdomen up and flings sticky silk with the combs on its hind feet, one leg after the other, at something already near. Shorter than a house spider’s cast and it holds longer — the setup for the bite that follows.
A widow’s venom does not bleed an animal, it cramps it, and past a line the cramp tips into a seizure — but off her fangs the body clears it, slowly. So when an animal is well cramped and not yet locked, the move is not to wait: it is one more bite, the dose that tips it over, and then strike the seized.
A western widow leaves her gumfoot webs where she has been. She stands on the far side of one from the animal hunting her, so the straight way to her runs through the glue — and an animal stuck in a web is the one she bursts.
Latrotoxin builds until the animal seizes: for a moment it cannot walk, turn or strike back. A widow that has learned to watch for it is on the animal before it can move again — and a bite then latches on something that cannot even pull away.
A tarantula’s abdomen is furred with barbed hairs it can shed on purpose. Threatened, it swings its back round onto the threat, lifts the abdomen and scrubs it with its hind legs, and a cloud of hairs comes off into the air behind it. Anything standing in that cloud starts to itch: its wind leaks away and comes back slowly, its strikes recover slowly and it turns less surely. The swing-round is the tell — a bug that reads it steps aside before the hairs come off.
A hurt or winded tarantula with something coming after it backs off through its own cloud, and stands on the far side of it. Whatever follows walks into the hairs to get there — slowed, half-blind and losing its wind.
A brute spider’s front legs end in stone spikes, and up close it uses them like a pneumatic drill: rooted to the spot and turned on the foe, it drives one spike down and then the other, five strokes in a second, each one a small hit. It cannot walk while it works, so it is a bet that the foe will stay in front of it — and a foe that steps aside leaves it hammering the dirt.
The stomp-jab does not just hurt: a spike that lands pins what it lands on, slowed for the moment it is held down. Thrown at an animal that is backing away, or winding up a strike of its own, it keeps it where the next blow can find it.
The jackhammer roots the Brute and hammers whatever is in front of it — which an animal that can still move simply steps out of. A pinned one cannot. The jab first, then the hammer, is the Brute’s whole combination.
The brute rears on its hind legs and brings all four front spikes down together. The ground shakes: anything standing near takes the blow, hardest at the heart of it, and is shoved back; anything in the air at that moment feels nothing. And the shaking breaks whatever is holding the brute — a pincer on a leg, a widow’s latch, a centipede’s coil — which makes the slam its answer to every grappler in the jar. The rear-up is the tell.
A rhinoceros beetle does not bite. It puts its head down, drives the long lower horn in under the foe and lifts: the animal comes up off the dirt, held crosswise between the two horns with its legs kicking at nothing. Up there it is not fighting, and everything the beetle does next — the crush, the throw — it does to an animal that cannot reach it. It has to be square on and close, with the front of the horns at the body: a foe across its shoulder is not in its horns at all. A centipede is too long to lift; the scoop just shoves it.
With an animal up in the horns, the beetle closes them. The squeeze is the one blow in the jar that goes half through armour, and it can be repeated as long as the hold lasts — which is not long: the held animal is pulling the whole time, and every second of holding costs the beetle wind. A brain that has learned this crushes early and often, and keeps enough wind for the throw at the end.
The ending of a lift. The beetle rears and flings the animal off its horns on a real arc, tumbling; it lands hard, often on its back, and the landing hurts by the speed it arrives at. Thrown before the hold runs out, it turns the whole lift into damage and distance — and a foe on its back is a foe that is not striking.
The only animal in the jar that flies. The wing cases come up, the wings unfold and it lifts off, and it keeps climbing for as long as it is in the air — you steer it. Press fly again to turn the flight off: it comes straight down onto whatever is under it, still steerable, so flying over a rock or a log and pressing is how it gets up there (the glass will not hold a beetle). Its own fights fly it on purpose: away from trouble, up to a foe on the furniture, or over the foe to come down on it from above. From the takeoff it is paying: flight burns wind every second and none comes back in the air. Silk on the wings, or anything that grabs it, brings it down.
From the air, over a foe below it, the beetle folds its wings and drops, armour first. The faster it arrives the harder it hits, and it comes down off the animal it struck. It costs a pounce and shares its cooldown, and a dive that misses leaves a beetle on the dirt with less wind than it took off with.
Head low, the beetle rushes the foe at a run, homing a little as it goes. What it hits, it hits with the horns and the whole weight behind them: a slim animal — a spider, a jumper, a scorpion — is thrown onto its back, a heavy one is only shoved. A charge wants a clean lane and a foe a few lengths out, square in front.
A velvet ant does not need to face what she stings. The gaster swings on its narrow waist — up and on over her back at something in front, round to a side, straight back — and the sting slides out of its tip. It hurts far more than it harms: what it lands on flinches, lets go of whatever it was holding, loses the strike it was throwing and a lump of wind, and smarts for a while after, its own strikes slow and weak. A brain that has learned this stings whatever is in reach and does not waste time turning.
Disturbed, a velvet ant rubs one ring of her gaster against the next and squeaks, again and again. In the jar it is a warning and a guard: for as long as the gaster rocks, a blow that lands on her is answered at once with the sting. Anything that has learned what the squeak means steps back until it stops; anything that has not pays for it. It costs a little wind and has a short wait.
The velvet ant's pounce is a grab. What it lands on is pinned where it stands, and the gaster comes round and stings it three times in quick succession — three doses of pain, three flinches, and whatever it was holding or throwing is gone. It wants a foe a few lengths out and a clean landing.
How a jumping spider takes an animal far bigger than itself: not head on, where the fangs and the arms are, but from beside or behind it. It works round out of the animal’s face and throws the leap at its back — and if it comes down there it stays, every leg clasped round the body, carried wherever the animal goes and out of reach of its head. Anything at least twice its girth can be ridden; a scorpion, a centipede or another jumper cannot. A leap thrown into the animal’s face is only a landing.
The point of the ride. On the animal’s back the head stabs down and the fangs go in, venom and all, every time they are ready. Holding on is effortless — a spider clings without trying — but every bite costs a little wind and none comes back up there, so a rider hops off before it is empty: one that rides until it slips comes down exhausted beside the animal it was biting. A blow that lands on it knocks it off; so does the Brute’s quake; and a tarantula’s fur is full of the hairs that itch.
Every animal’s answer to a jumper on its back. It heaves and twists — a pounce’s wind and its cooldown — and the rider is jolted on its seat; it takes two bucks to throw one clear, and the first moments of a ride, while the legs are still closing, cannot be bucked at all. A spider’s legs reach its own back, so a widow or the Brute brushes a rider off in one (the Brute’s quake slam throws it too); a mantis, whose stick of a body neither reaches its back nor shakes what is on it, needs four.
Drive it yourself to set the style. Your demonstrations count for half again as much as its own choices, and the habit rubs off even before the results come in. Ten fights driven by you will visibly bend a young bug.
Let it fight alone to fill the gaps. Fifteen behaviors — the perch, the drop, the baits, the corner traps, the stick-to-stick jumps — can only be found by a bug making its own decisions. A bug you only ever drive will have a lopsided panel.
Be consistent early. A young bug learns fast and a veteran barely moves: learning rate falls with every use of a behavior, so the first fifty matches write most of the personality. Nothing is ever fully locked — unused habits fade on their own — but late changes come slowly.
Do not expect all ten across the board. A bug good at everything would be a bug with no character. High marks in five or six behaviors and near-nothing in the rest is exactly what a strong veteran looks like.
It learns who it is fighting. Your bug can see whether it faces a house spider, a scorpion or a jumping spider, and every behavior can hold a different opinion for each. A bug raised against one species may need time to work out the other. A centipede reads as none of the three — your bug knows it is facing something else, and learns it as its own thing.