Day 1, 7:00 PM

“Grandmother dear, what big teeth you have.”

— Little Red Riding Hood

This young lady is spoiled to the bone. The thought hits me about five minutes after meeting her. She doesn’t let me near her cave, and when I offered her dinner, she threw the rock-bread onto the ground after biting into its stone-like crust.

Her throwing my food pissed me off, so I keep quiet about the jerky. I nibble on her discarded bread and treat myself with dry meat before going to sleep.

“Good morning, Little Missy,” I say while stretching, trying to activate my stiff, chilled muscles, especially the bruised shoulder. I wait for a bit, but the spoiled young heiress deigns me with nothing but growls.

I don’t want to stoop so low as to argue with a child, and I’m too mature for a ‘fuck you, I’m leaving’. Instead, I finish my morning routine before offering her breakfast.

“Little Missy, have some bread. It’s stale and hard and horrible, but if you chew slowly, you can eat it just fine.” I get no response, despite doing my best to paint the food even more unattractive than it actually is. Was that Blunt talking?

I wait a bit, and she remains quiet. Silence ain’t bad. She must be hungry.

“Come on, Little Missy, you haven’t eaten anything yesterday, and you must be famished.”

“You may offer me your bread,” she says, her words coming even haughtier in this new unknown language than they would in English, and I feel like slapping her.

I just offered it to you. Then I realize she might have meant it as a formal, ‘Give it to me,’ an idiom I don’t know or something.

I hand her the loaf you can crack nuts with, and the young miss takes her time eating the bludgeoning weapon. The thought of sharing the jerky crosses my mind thrice as I chew, but I decide against it for now.

I can always say I kept it as a last resort, since it’s easier to carry and conceal than the bread. I whisper to summon my status screen, but can’t tell much difference compared to yesterday. The last line of squiggles seems shorter, but that’s about it. I dismiss it, and focus on my companion.

“We should get going, Little Missy. Do you have a plan, or know the general direction we should take?”

“Our caravan was headed northward. To return home, we must travel south.” Her voice is composed, and there’s no hesitation as she speaks, meaning she has considered the matter before and reached certain conclusions. Which leaves one question.

Why the hell did you flee north? I don’t shout at her, though. I wouldn’t have found her had she not fucked up. Or we could be in the southern hemisphere, and I’m the dumbass? Or she just fled away from the attackers? She probably had a bodyguard or some other guardian, who told her to head this way.

“Where’s south?” I ask after getting a handle on the onslaught of questions and guesses. Then I realize I’ve made a mistake. I hope slaves in this world don’t have natural compasses like ducks or something. Hell, back on Earth, people sometimes went missing in the wilderness, despite having smartphones.

“I don’t know,” she says the thing I dreaded the second most, right after, ‘You’re not Aang the porter!’

I bite my lip.

Should we keep going in the same direction, or do we backtrack? If we head back, we risk another encounter with the bandits who annihilated our caravan.

We can’t risk aimless wandering. We lack food, and we don’t know where we are, nor where we would wind up if we continue blindly forward.

“Where is the sun at its zenith?” I ask, but she just stares at me blankly, saying nothing. “Where is the sun when it’s at its highest? Which cardinal direction?”

“North,” the young lady answers after several quiet seconds, fostering a confused frown.

So, we’re in the southern hemisphere, and she was going the right way. I take a moment to locate east. Even with my city-born survival skills, I can see the sporadic whitish-yellow rays which are managing to pierce the canopy above, and I get the rough idea where north and south are. I hope.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Just keep the sun at your back at all times, and you’ll be heading south. It will take longer, but the odds of getting lost are slimmer.

“This way,” I say and get up, but she stays put, staring at me.

“South is this way,” I repeat, pointing towards west or south-west.

She stays put, and I offer my hand to help her up. She doesn’t take it and stands on her own.

I can tell she doesn’t trust me, but she nods.

She doesn’t really have a choice, and she knows it.

I turn around so she can’t see my sour face and start pushing my way through the forest undergrowth. A moment later, I hear a rustle, and I know she’s following me.

Unfortunately, I lack the means to measure our progress, but I think we’re moving at a decent pace, despite her frilly yellow dress snagging on thorns and branches all the time.

“I’m hungry,” she says after what seems like several hours of walking in silence.

Should I play dumb or give her the jerky? I turn around and find the girl even messier than when I found her last evening. Her dress is torn in several places, revealing pale skin, and I gulp despite myself.

The dismay in her eyes changes, shifting from hungry-discontent to paranoid, becoming more substantial, more focused on me. She covers her perfectly decent, clothed bosom with her arms, as if she were naked, and stares daggers at me.

“Sorry,” I say, knowing I’ve freaked her out needlessly. “I’ve found some jerky on the men I killed. We could share it for lunch.”

Despite my peace offering of food, the distrust remains in her eyes. We eat the dry meat in awkward silence while walking, and then keep moving with the sun behind our backs for the rest of the day.

An hour before sunset we stumble across another creek. I drink my fill and wash my face without hesitation, but the young miss keeps her distance from me.

“You should drink, Little Missy. And I could stand guard if you wish to wash yourself.” I believe my words are courteous, gentlemanly, but the young lady’s shudder tells me a different story. She shakes her head, and I wonder whether this whole thing is me being socially inapt, or maybe Blunt is doing its thing, smashing my foot with a rock.

Still, she drinks some water upstream from my position without saying a word and shows no sign of wanting to undress and wash herself. I shrug at the spoiled brat, and lead the way forward until the forest grows dark.

“I want dinner. I need a safe place to spend the night,” she announces, as if I’m a fucking wizard, built for conjuring food and shelter out of thin air.

“I’m out of food,” I lie, intending to eat the leftover bacon during the night.

Originally, I wanted to ration it, but my body is starved and the more I eat the more my stomach growls, screaming for sustenance. As far as searching for a shelter is concerned, I have no reason to look for one to benefit her selfish ass. She did not share last night, even though it looked like the cave had ample space for two.

“We could search for a cave or a hollow tree to spend the night?” I offer with little interest, and she starts searching without saying a word. I follow close behind her, appreciating her young, shapely rear, and the girl looks over her shoulders every half a minute, seemingly more afraid of me than whatever the forest night has in store.

What’s happening? Am I doing something wrong? As expected, we prove unable to find a passable shelter before darkness sets in, and my mood also grows darker. I have no idea what’s wrong with the young miss, nor why she’s making her paranoid display.

The only thing I know is the more time I spend with her, the more I wish to strangle her self-centered ass.

A sharp howl snaps me out of my brooding, followed by a stupid question.

“What was that?” the Karen-in-the-making asks, and my eye twitches.

“Wolf, climb.” I can hear rather than see her turn towards the tree at whose base we stopped for the night. She jumps onto it like a terrified cat and scales it just as swiftly, scratching and clawing all the while. Despite Young Missy’s best sincere effort, something rustles behind my back before I start climbing.

I turn, pressing my back against the bark, waving my club before me, utterly blind in the night’s gloom. My heart is pounding, and my throat turns dry. I try to swallow saliva, but somehow my throat sticks together. Unfortunately, I don’t get to curse my incompetence at basic bodily functions because the nocturnal predator has chosen that exact moment to attack me.

The rustle grows louder, followed by a growl a moment before razor-like teeth bite into my left forearm. The blue screen appears as I shrink my neck into my torso, impersonating a turtle as much as humanly possible, which means rather poorly. I dismiss the lethal distraction and blindly smash the club into the wolf’s head.

I hear a crack, and its teeth sink even deeper into my arm. Another blue screen appears, and the forest rustles all around me. I spin, brandishing the club and driving away empty air, but the wolves remain undaunted.

More rustling enters my ear, and my calf blooms with pain as another beast tears into my flesh.

To make matters worse, yet another blue screen pops up.

[◎∆¬π°∆✌︎†≠⚇∆†π⎃\

⎃©◎∆†≠Ωß°~°†˘Ω°£≠ß©†π✢°✢≠␦°✢π✌︎Ωß⎃✢\]

The hieroglyphs are different, yet still unreadable squiggles. But even if they were perfectly readable, my mind blurs before I read the second line.

The next thing I know is my head is spinning. I’m lying on the ground, wet and sticky. It’s still the dead of night, and somehow I’m alive.

I know I’m alive because I’ve been dead before, and it didn’t hurt this much. I catch a wheeze and realize I’m hearing my own ragged breathing. I know it’s paramount to check my wounds, but I can’t see, and I’m dead tired.

“Are you alive?” the girl above asks, and I don’t know what to say to that lukewarm inquiry about my condition.

I open my mouth to respond, but end up spitting hair and blood. Did I bite a wolf?

After a series of ‘pfts,’ I’m well enough to answer.

“I’m alive. How are you doing, Little Missy? Are you unharmed?”

The girl doesn’t respond right away, and just as I lose hope for our further communication, she says, “I’m fine. Thank you.”

Yes! A step in the right direction! I smile and pass out.