Fly Duel

A fly lands on the pond. You both go for it. Only one of you has a tongue. Fly Duel is a reflex game about a race you are slowly losing. You start against a giant anteater — the one opponent on the ladder slower than a human being — and finish against a trap-jaw ant whose jaws shut in 0.13 milliseconds. Thirteen animals, each one faster than the last. REAL ANIMALS, REAL NUMBERS Every opponent plays the way it actually hunts. The Argentine horned frog commits explosively but has a short tongue, so it owns close range and gives up the far corner. The veiled chameleon is slow to aim and unstoppable once it fires. The mantis reads you, sharpening as your streak climbs — because a real mantis shortens its strike against faster prey. The star-nosed mole decides whether something is food in eight milliseconds, about as fast as a nerve can carry the signal. None of this is flavour text. The measurements are published figures, and they are what the difficulty is built from. THE TRICK A tongue does not teleport. It travels. So the time it needs depends on how far away the fly spawned — and a fly down by your thumb hands you a couple hundred extra milliseconds that a fly near the mouth never will. Once raw speed stops being enough, the game changes underneath you. It stops being about tapping fast and starts being about reading the board. THE BESTIARY Every animal you face is added to a library: its portrait, its binomial, the measured fact behind how it behaves, and exactly how many seconds it leaves you. Entries you have not reached stay locked, so you can see how far the ladder goes without being told what is on it. SET YOUR OWN SPEED The game runs at about 5% of a real bullfrog, and says so. You can drop it to 3% or push it to 10%, and there is a 100% setting that is a demonstration rather than a difficulty — nobody beats an actual bullfrog. Scores scale with the setting, so the board stays honest. RULES • Tap the fly before the strike lands. • Every 10 rounds a new opponent takes the far bank. • Wild taps freeze you for a beat, so mashing will not save you. • Three stolen flies and the run is over. FOUR LANGUAGES English, Spanish, Persian and Kurdish (Sorani), switchable in Settings — interface, animal names, every fact and every taunt. Persian and Sorani read right to left with Eastern Arabic-Indic numerals. BUILT FROM NOTHING There are no image or sound files in this app. Thirteen animals, the pond, the fly and every noise they make are generated on your phone as you play — the skin is a lit material with real warts and wet highlights, and the music is composed live, speeding up and turning dissonant as the opponent closes in. No accounts. No ads. No tracking. No network code at all. Your scores stay on your phone.