About ten minutes later, I sat defeated in a scattered pile of sticks, utterly at a loss and beyond frustrated.

It was then that Ren decided to make his appearance again. He emerged from the thicket with a loud rustle, startling me into dropping the stick I had been drilling on top of another.

“Ren!” I called out in annoyance. “I was so close! I swear I was starting to see smoke!”

Ren turned around to look at me, a comically confused expression spreading over his face as he surveyed the mess I’d made. Sticks lay strewn around me, and I sat cross-legged beside a larger pile of them.

A small, strange smile spread across his face as he focused on me, his face glowing like he was barely holding back his laughter. “Ruby?” he asked.

“What?” I responded sharply, annoyed by his amusement.

“What are you doing?” he asked in response, his voice tinged with laughter.

“What do you mean? I’m trying to get a fire started, obviously. It’s not like I’ve ever been taught this stuff. How am I supposed to know how to do-”

I suddenly paused, a realization finally clicking in my brain. A serene moment of silence passed over the beach before I spoke again. “Ah,” I said finally, my voice quieter, muted. “Fire.”

Ren nodded patiently. “Fire,” he repeated.

“That’s…That’s my thing, isn’t it?” I asked, my voice still quiet.

Ren nodded again. “That is your thing,” he confirmed, like a parent talking to an especially slow child.

A heavy sigh escaped my lips. “Damn,” I said, too defeated to come up with anything else.

In the silence that followed, I sent some Flux to the tip of my index finger, igniting it to make a small, candle-sized flame. As it burned on my finger, I touched it to the pile of sticks in front of me. The first stick, the driest of them, quickly caught on, slowly spreading it to the rest of the pile.

Soon, the entire pile was ablaze, transforming into a miniature inferno burning in front of me.

Ren opened his mouth to say something finally, but I silenced him with a pointed glare. Instead, he simply smiled again and hauled the deer he’d been dragging off to the side.

Curious and done with my duties, I made my way over to him, wanting to see what strange animal he had brought.

Ren crouched down as he stopped, judging himself to be far enough to do whatever he needed to do. I came up from behind him, peering over his shoulder at the animal. It looked exactly like a deer at first glance. It was about as tall as Ren, with lean, muscled legs and brown fur all over its body. Only the underbelly was covered in a more off-white coloured fur.

There was also a thin line of red that ran along the length of its neck, but I guessed that was a feature that only marked those deer unfortunate enough to cross Ren’s path.

However, as I looked closer, I quickly spotted other features that were alien to Earthen deer. Its antlers had sharpened edges and tips, making each of the branches a blade. The hooves each had three curved claws extending from their centers, and its jaws were lined with horribly sharp teeth.

I didn’t know how powerful the animal was, but judging by its arsenal of weapons and the lean muscles I could make out through the fur, it couldn’t have been an easy foe. Which made Ren’s clean kill of the animal all the more impressive since, as far as I could tell, the wound on the neck was the only wound Ren had left behind.

All the while, Ren ignored my examination of the animal, whisking out his dagger as he got to work.

I really, really did not want to watch, but I forced myself to sit down and try to memorize his movements. I needed to learn, and there was no space to accommodate for discomfort when our survival was at risk.

Ren’s hand worked deftly, skinning and gutting the animal with practiced ease. At some point, he needed my help to hold up the animal for a while, and I swallowed my disgust and forced myself to help. The smell was stomach-wrenching, but still, I forged on. The pinkish skin of the animal was warm and clammy, but I gripped it tight as Ren did his work.

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The hot sun sank a little as Ren worked, cutting the animal up into smaller and smaller pieces. I stayed and watched the entire thing, staying silent as I tried to commit to memory every step of the process. I knew it would take a few more times until I could go through the whole process myself, and certainly many more before I could get to Ren’s level of ease and speed, but I was sure I’d get there someday. After all, we were stuck on the beach for the foreseeable future anyway.

Eventually, Ren wrapped up his work, giving me a smile before heading off to the ocean to clean himself. He had blood all over him – from the pirates, the bats, and the deer – so he spent a considerably longer time in the water than I did.

After a while, Ren finally made his way back out of the water, dripping wet. Making his way back to the deer’s carcass, Ren picked up a few cuts of lean meat and brought them over to the still-blazing fire I had set up. Poking two of them through with a stick, Ren offered one to me and held his over the fire, sitting down comfortably as he did. Copying his movements, I sat down beside him and held the stick above the flames.

As simple a thing as holding meat over fire should have been, I quickly came to find that I was absolutely horrible at it. I kept holding the meat either too high or too low, burning some sides and barely cooking others.

Still, eventually, the pink cuts began to look more like the meats I’d seen in advertisements for restaurants, and a mouthwatering smell began to waft off of them. My stomach rumbled as I soaked in the smell, realizing for the first time that I was far hungrier than I had thought.

With a wide grin, I turned to Ren to ask if the meat was ready to eat, only to find that he had already dug in.

With a huff of laughter, I moved to start eating as well, only to suddenly stop with the stick of meat halfway to my mouth.

Ren eventually noticed my frozen state, breaking out from his gleeful reverie as he quickly found what had caught my attention.

There was a glint that came from the dark thicket of the jungle, just the tiniest sliver of light that had caught my eye. But that wasn’t what Ren saw.

“Five, humanoid, armed, I think,” Ren fired off in quick succession, his brow furrowed in concentration as he focused his senses in the jungle’s direction.

I nodded without turning my attention away from the jungle for a second. My free hand reached out in the sand for the pole I had left just a foot away. My grip tightened around it when I found it, the tension of the moment rising with every passing second.

Whatever beings lay hidden in the jungle had to have known that we had discovered them – likely because of my unabashed staring in their direction, although no one could say for sure – because they quickly revealed themselves afterwards.

There were actually six of them, but Ren was right about the rest of his observations. They were each armed, albeit with crude weapons of wood and stone. The assortment of daggers and spears in their hands were obviously homemade, but that didn’t make them any less fatal. A jagged, sharpened stone through the heart would kill you just the same as any steel blade would.

The sight of the beings themselves, however, was what caught my attention. They were unlike anything I’d ever seen before, but they fit a description close enough that I was able to instantly classify them to a race I’d only ever read about in fantasy novels.

Goblins.

Sickly pale green skin covered their small, gangly bodies. They sported elongated noses and wider ears, trademark qualities of the common fantasy race. Not everything matched exactly, however. They sported dirty brown beards and braided hair that fell down in varying lengths, with the claws and teeth of a wolf, and brown furred pelts over their torsos.

It was instantly clear what their objectives were, as all six of their beady eyes immediately locked onto the sticks of meat in mine and Ren’s hands, before making their way behind us to where the rest of the meat and what was left of the deer’s carcass remained.

The one closest to us, the one I assumed was the leader, emitted a low, menacing growl at us, as if warning us to step away.

But the terror that had frozen my veins had long since vanished, transformed into a hungered rage as I realized what they wanted. They were weird and scary, sure, but they wanted my food, and I was hungry. And that was enough to push me over my initial fear. After all, with everything I’d been through, goblins weren’t even the weirdest things I’d fought.

And at the end of the day, no matter what kind of beast stood in my way, all I had to do was burn it to the ground.

With that thought in mind, a maddened grin spread over my face as I faced down the goblins. Flux gathered above my palm as I ignited it, forming the flames into the rough shape of an arrow.

The goblins' eyes widened at the sight of the magic, the brilliant orange sparking fear in their eyes. Their leader, sensing his men’s fear, shrieked a warcry as he raised his spear high. A moment later, the rest of the goblins responded in kind, their confidence bolstered, and the troupe raced forward as they came at us.

The goblins all closed in on me first, clearly singling me out as the greatest threat. In response, I launched the arrow at the leader’s chest, since he was the closest to me, but he managed to sidestep fast enough to avoid taking a fatal hit. Still, the arrow caught him on the shoulder, knocking him off balance and eliciting a painful hiss.

Stepping forward to meet the charge of the remaining five goblins, I gripped my pole tight and formed swirling flames around my other fist, feeding the fire with my own Flux.

“Come and get it, boys!” I yelled out at them, grinning ear to ear in anticipation.