Forever

The wolves stepped closer to Salim, and he was finally able to make out some more features as their bodies were highlighted by the starlight above. Muscular legs and jaws revealed themselves, drooling and licking their lips. Their fur was much shorter, almost like a sphynx, their pace menacing, emanating a primal edge.

He couldn’t call them wolves due to the dramatically different look, brutally savage with rows of teeth like a shark, their slow stalking sending chills up his spine. Trying to back out of the encirclement they were making around him, Salim watched as they matched his pace and within seconds a wolf was facing his back. They didn’t howl or bark at him, just low-pitched whining noises that reverberated around him.

Waving his stick around like a bat, Salim was able to step forward and clip one of the creatures in the head with a hollow thud. The creature locked in place, its head rattled as Salim came in with another strike, impacting its skull with a satisfying crunch. It dropped instantly, but the other wolf creatures didn’t sit by and watch, charging at him and with gnashing teeth and snarls.

Salim felt a force bite down on his shoulder and knee as suddenly, a blender fur and teeth all around him ripping into his flesh. Salim screamed, trying to throw the wolves off of him unsuccessfully. He felt himself getting dragged to the ground, his stick clattering uselessly into the undergrowth.

Not like this, not like this, not again.

He repeated the mantra in his head, trying not to let the pain overwhelm him. Failing to move in any meaningful way as the wolves locked him in place, Salim reached out in desperation to [Bolstered Stamina]. Vision fading, he struggled to concentrate through the pain, but just as the pit in his stomach began to form, he found what he was looking for. The skill responded with ferocity, fading the pain just enough for him to grapple one of the wolves and slam it into the ground.

It yelped as something snapped, lying on the ground paralyzed. Reaching around for the ankle-biter, his arm got caught in the mouth of another wolf, causing more blood to streak onto the ground. Getting a good grasp around the mouth clamped around his arm to stop it from shredding anything else, Salim gouged its face, stabbing a finger into its left eye and slamming his fist down onto its head.

It let go and fell onto the now-muddied red ground as Salim’s side got ripped into by another wolf. They just kept coming, and with his blurry vision he wasn’t able to identify how many were left. Despite the bleak situation he wasn’t feeling dizzy from the blood loss, either from his high [Resilience] or skill usage kept him alive, but blood still gushed from the many gouges across his body.

Trying to step over a downed wolf, Salim tripped, falling on top of the wolf that was using his ankle as a messy chew toy. It took the opportunity to latch onto his stomach, biting down and only stopping once its teeth hit his rib cage with the chatter of bone hitting bone. His mind in a haze of pain as the wolf failed to bite through his ribs, Salim slammed the flank of the wolf. With a meaty thump, the wolf wining before falling silent as he stomped its head into the dirt.

Scrambling away from the remaining wolves, they also backed off, eyeing him warily as Salim watched them begin dragging the other bodies out of sight. Seeing the remains of the pack busy, Salim scrambled away, using trees as cover, to get as far away from the wolves as possible.

He knew that he needed to stop the bleeding before he ran out of juice, but never in his life had he treated wounds bigger than a small knife cut while cooking. Scrambling to find anything that would staunch the bleeding, Salim grabbed some large flat leaves from a nearby tree and shoved them into the wounds. Hiss, the burning sensation of shoving random foliage into the still raw wounds stung, but with the combination of adrenaline and his skill it was manageable.

It was obvious that his impromptu natural triage wouldn’t be enough to save his life, so Salim banked on his level-up.

Maybe if I had enough [Resilience] then the wounds would heal or stop bleeding or… Salim’s mind began to trail as he began to feel dizzy. Trying to stop himself from falling over, Salim slapped himself with his less injured arm to try and concentrate. Eventually, while he was considering wrapping a vine around his arm to stop blood flow, the box finally showed up.

You successfully escaped a ‘Wolf Pack’

Event has been Logged.

You have gained a Level!

The whole life-or-death situation wasn’t even worth a double level-up to the system.

Lvl. 11

Stats

Confirm

Might: 25

-/+

Finesse: 18

-/+

Resilience: 25(35)

-/+

Acuity: 15

-/+

Resolve: 15

-/+

Depth: 12

-/+

Throwing all his hope into [Resilience] was not much of a plan, but he didn’t know what else to do except die and hope to do better in the next life. His skin cracked and hardened when he hit confirm, slowly working its way across the many teeth marks and gored skin across his body.

Horrifyingly his plan had worked, the skin at the edges of the wounds worked its way across the pockmarked skin, closing around the leaves he had shoved into the wounds, leaving him looking like someone who tried to poorly disguise himself as a tree. It hurt, especially as his veins slowly ran dry of adrenaline, his heart exhausting the rest of his body.

The wounds slowly became welts over the next couple of minutes, skin still red and slightly bulbous with the leaves underneath his skin, any pressure he put on the inflated area hurt, so he tried his best to avoid any contact with them. Eventually, he ran out of energy, and found himself planted on the ground with his head spinning, tears streaming from the pain of the welts on his back touching the course dirt.

Not finding a way to make himself comfortable, Salim lay for a bit while the exhaustion caught up with him, pushing him down like a weighted blanket into unwilling dreams.

Waking up was a test of Salim’s mental fortitude, as the slightest movement set his pain receptors into a spiral of stings and aches. Eventually fighting his way onto his feet, Salim looked at his injuries, looking just as inflated and red as before he passed out. Wanting to get out of the area before the wolves caught back up with him, Salim had to hike back to the area where he had been ambushed, since he had fled the wrong way in his panic.

After giving a wide berth, he finally got around the ambush spot, although it was little consolation as the wolves still loomed in his mind. Still anxious and looking around for an attack at any moment, after a few hours of nothing, he was back to his regular hiking patterns. Taking the time to avoid each branch that might scrape past his arm or brush against his leg consumed a lot of mental effort and left little room for other things besides navigating with his skill.

He was getting closer, although his speed was significantly reduced, he could just feel it.

So maybe walking through a forest at night wasn’t the best idea. Next time, I’m not going to be so stupid that I- “AHH.” Salim yelped as a small branch that was sturdier than it looked pushed into one of the sores on his arm.

Wincing and lightly rubbing the afflicted skin, Salim decided to take a break, he wasn’t in any shape to try his previous pace and worried that using [Bolstered Stamina] would just lead to him reopening his wounds if he barreled through the forest like before. Looking around for useful material, he eventually found a dry set of sticks along with a dry enough log. Wanting to occupy his time with something, Salim spent some time practicing his fire-making skills.

It was easier the second time, simply because his points in resilience barely let him feel the rough wood on his calloused hands along with his measured expectations. Without the aid of his skill, Salim was able to heat up the wood over the course of an hour. Excited that he was able to get smoke from the log, he tried to shove leaves and moss closer to the blackened wood. Unfortunately they didn’t seem to want to catch, and after several more minutes of coaxing, he was unable to get an actual fire started, going to bed annoyed.

Salim’s life continued painfully for the next few days, he didn’t see any of the creatures he had deemed as ‘Dire-Wolves’ but was committed to staying hidden so that he never had the opportunity to meet back up with the beasts. The sores had slowly started fading away for the first couple of days while his skin slowly rejected the leaves, turning the spots a darker brownish color. The leaves that were exposed to air were almost all ripped off, now they were like weird skin tags, and he couldn’t stop himself from fidgeting with the nubs coming off his skin.

At night, he would spend time staring up at the stars, wondering if anyone he knew was doing the same, thinking of him. The loneliness was getting worse, but not in the same homesick way he felt at first. Now it was more like a slow despair, making him feel empty, but he was strung so thin trying to survive that even in his quiet moments it didn’t bother him too much.

He couldn’t pinpoint exactly where the feeling changed, but something about the moonless sky felt familiar to him, despite the distinct lack of a moon that he had eventually confirmed. It was a small distraction, giving him something to fixate on, wondering if the planet had any tides or if the moon simply wasn’t visible from the surface.

However, his health slowly started taking a turn for the worse, as the sores he thought had gone away suddenly reappeared with a vengeance. Boils had postmarked his skin, making it painful for him to move and fogging his mind with pain. He knew that it was some type of disease or infection, but what could he do, invent medicine?

If he didn’t know how to patch his wounds, then cleaning and disinfecting the boils across his body was impossible. It was frustrating, but at the same time, being marked for death was freeing in a twisted way. He gave it fifty-fifty odds that he wouldn’t stay dead permanently as long as he hadn’t hallucinated the giant redwood forest, but with his sickened mind, the odds didn’t seem so bad.

It left him far more willing to use [Bolstered Stamina] as liberally as possible, and after a couple of days it was the only thing keeping him from a bedridden state. His new feeling of freedom didn’t mean that he would run through the forest again, and while he could now feel that he was dying, it didn’t mean he wanted to get mauled to death.

So he walked for a few days, his skin slowly transforming from boils to lesions before spreading giant purple rashes all across his body. By the end of the week, he was sure that his body was a giant rash that only existed to torture him for whatever crime he had committed in the past to deserve this fate. Finally, after a week of travel, Salim felt himself finally reach the location as he scrambled, close eyed, along the forest floor.

His original intention of finding something ‘interesting’ had left Salim’s mind a few weeks back, but the goal had kept him moving, the thought of giving up had been a constant whisper for the past couple of agonizing days. It wasn’t so much pain that he could barely function, it was just a constant aching that grated at the nerves and wore his determination down each time he bumped into a tree or stepped on a particularly thorny bush.

Opening his eyes, Salim had to look past his swollen eyelids, slowly widening them to try and take in the sight before him. The forest was situated on higher ground, and he had reached the edge, below him was a cliff face that quickly became sheer rock as he went further down. Below was an expanse of grassy hills interspersed with floating shiny rocks. Floating.

It was hard to tell what rocks were sitting on the ground or simply suspended diagonally in the air, but there were multiple rocks that were clearly disconnected from the ground even at the distance Salim was viewing from. The view was something out of a fantasy illustration, and even deathly sick, it filled him with awe and wonder before being swept away by aching pains.

You journeyed through a forest under extreme circumstances

Major Event has been Logged.

You have gained a Level!

You have gained a Level!

The box popped into his vision for several seconds, Salim swiped to the right before laying himself out on the edge of the plateau. Feeling resigned, he glanced over the edge at the vista spread out before him and sighed. Letting go of [Bolstered Stamina], he slipped into fever-induced sleep.