I throw up.

Fwah! A new thing! A new shiny thing!

I snatch the shiny thing from the dirt and hold it up to the sky, flicking away the thin film of soil-specked stomach juices clinging to it. It glitters and shines a pretty silver in the morning sunlight beaming down from between the leaves and branches up above.

A cute bracelet maybe? No, some kind of hairpin? It’s—!

“... A spoon.” It’s a spoon.

“Lame," I say aloud, before popping the spoon back into my mouth and swallowing it back down again. I don't need a spoon so I'll send it back where it came from. Thankfully, it's a lot easier going down than it was coming up. I'm not sure why it had to come out sideways after all...

Hmm. Should I try puking again? For what though? What am I hoping comes out this time? Hopefully something with a lot of protein. I wonder if there's much protein in a spoon? Maybe I should’ve let it sit inside my stomach a bit before sending it back...

My stomach growls loudly, snapping me away from my wandering thoughts.

"Yeah, yeah," I growl back. "I'll think of something."

Alright. Let’s calm down and think about this properly for a second, Pepper.

Folding my arms in front of me and keeping my feet firmly planted on the ground, I arch myself backward until my head touches the dirt and I've achieved the perfect bridge position. The ultimate position for thinking about things properly for a second.

In this position— No. In this stance, all the blood rushes straight to my head, boosting my brainpower sixfold and allowing me to process the most complex of thoughts in mere seconds. The only weakness of this stance is that it leaves me completely open and vulnerable to any outside attacks. However...

“Fwahaha! Pepper Black is a woman who has zero weaknesses!” I laugh, tightening every muscle in my body. The audible snap of taut muscle rings out across the sea of trees and brush as my body instantly becomes as hard as any metal. A special technique born from the years of loving care and attention I’ve given to developing each and every one of my one thousand one hundred and twenty-four individual muscles.

A recent lack of protein in my diet has made executing this technique a little tricky, so—Let’s not waste this opportunity and let’s think about this properly for a second.

I enter my Mind Gym—an inner palace inside my mind where I can organize my thoughts more clearly. An endless white space stretches out before me. At the centre of the blankness, I find her—the fitness instructor of my mind. My personal brainer. The super smart, super cute, dynamite-beauty looks over at me as she bench presses a particularly heavy thought.

Yo! Pepper! Long time no see! Mind spotting me for a bit? This one’s a heavy one!

Yo! Pepper! It’s been a while! I got you covered! What’re you benching anyway?

This? It’s about the protein content of a spoon. Might take a few more sets to work this one out.

Ah, actually that thought can wait. There’s another thought I need your help with first. It's about non-spoon-related protein. Know how we can get our hands on some meat?

Meat? Just do the usual. Go kill a goblin or ten and turn them into jerky. We love jerky!

That’s the problem. There aren’t any goblins! I can’t find any! They were everywhere back in the Underground but up here it’s all just trees. Trees aren’t meat either. I checked.

Tsk, tsk, tsk, Pepper. Things might be a little different in the Outside but meat is still the same wherever you go. If you want to find meat, you have to think like meat.

Think like meat, huh? Huh. So if I was meat, where would I...

“Hm?”

Hold on a second... I am meat! And where am I right now? In the forest! Looking for meat!

“That’s it!”

Snapping back to reality, I spring upright from my Sixfold Mind stance. A stance I’ve suddenly given a name to for the very first time. I’m sure it didn’t already have one in the past. And I’m sure I won’t forget it this time.

It’s clear to me now. Meat wants to eat, not be eaten. The reason I haven’t been able to find any meat in this forest is because meat doesn’t want to be eaten. Although it too searches for meat, if threatened by more powerful meat, the lesser meat will obviously choose to run and hide.

Basically, I’m the biggest badass in this forest and I’m scaring all the food away. I’m going to have to appear less threatening if I want to lure something out.

I clear my throat.

“Oh no!” I yell. “I’ve fallen! And I can’t get up!”

Wrapping my arms around a nearby tree trunk, I flex all the muscles in my upper body and pull upwards. The tree creaks and groans under the pressure of my grip as it lifts away from the dirt.

I suplex the tree, completely uprooting it from the ground.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The two of us fall backward, showering the surroundings with an explosion of leaves, soil, and broken branches. Other trees caught in its path snap and splinter loudly under the weight of the fallen log, disrupting the previously calm and tranquil ambiance.

Waiting for the noise to come to a stop, I clear my throat once again.

“Oh no!” I yell. “I, a frail and beautiful young maiden, have been pinned underneath this tree by complete accident somehow! Somebody help!”

A few more minutes of dramatic wailing and cries for help go by before I notice some rustling from a nearby bush. A short, ugly, green creature steps out from it, draped in dirty brown furs and holding a crudely crafted spear.

Fwah! A goblin!.. A goblin. Just the one... Hmm.

“O-oh no! A goblin!” I yell, still pinned beneath the fallen tree. “If there were maybe, like, two more of them, I would be in some meal— some real trouble!” I gulp back the saliva forming in my mouth, trying to mask the excited look on my face as I eye the goblin hungrily.

The goblin watches me suspiciously from a distance, before turning back towards the brush. He screeches an unpleasant, garbled shriek and two more goblins join him. The three of them step towards me cautiously, weapons raised in front of them.

“O-o-oh no! What a steak— mistake I've made! Somebody please savoury— please save me from these—“The goblins step into my range. “jerkies!”

I burst out from underneath the fallen tree, splitting it in half with an explosion of wood and splinters. Before they can even react, I bite a chunk out of the nearest goblin's head, crunching its skull between my teeth and then spitting the fragments of bone into the face of a second goblin, killing both of them instantly.

The third goblin shrieks, and swings his makeshift spear at me in a panic, before suddenly dropping it and collapsing to his knees. He looks up at me with a confused expression as I chew happily on the little snack skewered on the end of my finger, before looking down at the gaping hole in his chest and joining his two companions in the afterlife.

“Fwahaha!” I laugh up at the sky. “Meat found!”

Hmm. Now how should I go about preparing these three?

As much as I'd love to turn them into goblin jerky, something like that takes a long time to dry and prepare, so let's just do this the old-fashioned way!

Finding a particularly dry-looking stick—I slip it between my breasts. Flexing my chest muscles, I vibrate my pectorals as fast as I can pump them. The stick instantly catches alight and, carefully taking it back out, I use it to build myself a campfire.

I toss the three goblins onto the flame and wait for the smell of mostly cooked goblin meat to tickle my nose.

“Fwah~! That hit the spot!” Throwing away the scraps of bone and other inedible gunk from my freshly cooked and devoured lunch, I stretch in satisfaction, jumping to my feet and wiping the dirt from the back of my dress. It was a frilly black and white thing with a short skirt, open chest, and a cute little black ribbon at the front. It was something I had thrown up a while back and decided to keep and wear because of how cute it was.

Alright! Now that my protein problems are dealt with, what was I doing before I got the case of the meat munchies again? I was...

Oh! That’s right! I remember!

“I’m lost! Completely and totally lost!”

I was supposed to be meeting up with my sister in a nearby town so we could go shopping together, but... Apparently, the nearest town was only supposed to be one or two days away once I reached the Outside. I feel like it’s probably been a little longer than that though.

What’s a human town supposed to look like anyway? Maybe I passed it already? Maybe I wandered right through it without even noticing? No, I couldn’t have. I would have seen humans around obviously. So...

Fwah! The map! The map Trish gave me before we split up!

I lift my skirt and pull out the roll of paper tucked securely underneath my panty waistband. My dress doesn’t have any pockets after all.

I unravel the paper and stare at the hastily scrawled sketch in front of me. It looks like something Trish must’ve drawn up very quickly herself, with small icons acting as important landmarks in the surrounding area to help guide me.

“Yup!” Blinking down at the map in my hands, I nod my head in affirmation. “I can’t read this!”

To start with, I have no idea where I’m supposed to be on this map. None of these landmarks look familiar to me. In fact, I can’t even tell what they’re supposed to be.

Hold on, Pepper. Think. What was it Trish told me before we split up?

East. To reach the town, just follow the map east. You can’t miss it.

East! East, huh? Wait, which way is east? I think she said it was the big ‘E’ on the map but I don’t see it. I get that ‘S’ and ‘N’ are supposed to be ‘South’ and ‘North’, but what’s ‘M’ supposed to mean? I don’t remember Trish teaching me about an ‘M’ direction. And don’t even get me started on this ‘3’ either.

Fwahaha! As expected from my beloved elder sister! She was definitely drunk when she drew this up. Silly woman. I’ll have to remember to give her a big kiss on the mouth when I meet up with her again as payback for giving me something so useless.

I toss the map onto the campfire.

Think, Pepper. What else was it Trish told you?

You’re holding the map upside down, dumbass.

No, not that. The other thing she said. About the sun.

When you inevitably do find yourself lost, just head towards the rising sun.

I see! The rising sun, huh? So, if we look at which way the sun is rising now, we can see that... it’s night! He isn’t rising at all, Trish! He’s already gone home!

Huh. I could’ve sworn it was still morning. Oh well.

I lie back down next to the campfire and stare out at the star-speckled sky up above. Hundreds, thousands, millions of tiny little lights in a sea of endless open sky. It’s beautiful.

It’s my first time seeing something like this. There wasn’t anything like this back home underground after all. I wonder if my mom and sisters got to see this same view every night back when they used to rampage across these lands all those years ago. Must’ve been nice.

I gaze up at the brightest light in the sky, a beautiful ring of silver with a hazy blue light at its centre. An almost translucent blue glow, softly flickering as it casts a gentle light on the world down below. That must be the moon. I wonder if there’s anyone up there? Looking down at me looking up at them? I wonder if they’re strong!

Yawning, I gently close my eyes, making a mental note to add ‘fight somebody strong on the moon’ to my list of things I want to do while I’m up here on the surface.

Make one hundred friends.

Kiss one thousand girls on the mouth.

Fight somebody strong on the moon.

Fwahaha! Pepper Black is a woman who will have more fun than anybody else that’s ever lived! I can’t wait to tell Mom all about it!

With a smile on my face, my consciousness slowly drifts away, the heat from the campfire gently licking at my side. In the distance, the sound of a hundred little footsteps beating against the forest floor gently lulls me into a deep sleep.

Whatever that is, I’m sure it can wait until tomorrow.