“CASS!”

I cursed myself for my stupidity.

I’d been hearing the furious screeches of the bear for the past thirty minutes. My guess was the entire forest could. Turns out that owl bears have super sensitive eyes. Who’d of thought?

But the world required balance, and while I had the lucky break of escaping from a predator with over ten levels of difference with me. My frantic running had resulted in me spraining my ankle. In all fairness to the world and karma, I should have seen this coming. I hadn’t pushed myself all out like that since college, and while I hit the gym to stay in shape, my near thirty-year-old body had been sitting too much. I sighed as I tried to stand again. For the past 15 minutes, I had been taking it easy, trying to let my ankle heal.

I flipped my stats on, looking at my page. Sure enough, solar heal, that passive ability I had noticed before was now actively healing my ankle. It had been 15 minutes, and the ankle was already feeling a little better. When I had first twisted, I tried getting up only to put some weight on it and immediately collapse. Well, time to try again.

I reached over to the wood of my spear. Gripping with both hands, I dug the end into the ground and levered myself up. Okay, I can work with this. Hopping on one leg, I used the spear to help me keep balance and took a step. Pain radiated through my ankle and up my leg, but I could put a bit of weight on it.

I was at the base of a rocky hill on the edge of a narrow ravine. I’d seen it before. It was a narrow thing, only about six feet wide, looking like a giant crack in the rocky portion of the mountain I was working my way up. If you followed the giant crack of a ravine, it narrowed and crossed the cliff at an angle. I was working to get to the portion where it slanted. I would hide in there and it would be too narrow for any vengeful owl bear. I had been lucky, so far, but if the Alpha Owl Bear was as intelligent as my identification spell led me to believe, then I knew I had an enemy that would look for me. Fortunately, unlike grizzly bears from Earth, the bear didn’t have a good sense of smell. Otherwise, I suspect I would already be dead.

I leaned on my spear, taking step by painful step up the mountain. It was probably a quarter of a mile away, but the path was clear. The uphill battle was exhausting and as I continued, time passed as I focused on taking inching my way closer to my shelter. I didn’t come this far after all to be taken out by some stupid creature that wanted the bear’s leftovers. I was going to get into that crack, heal up, and then get to the meadow.

I could see it now. Danielle would smile at my entrance, Yumi would be beaming. Jimbo and Haley looking at me with hero worship in their eyes. Yeah, so I’m a little vain. Give me a break. Whoever tells you they don’t enjoy having a fan club is just lying to you.

The daydreaming did its trick, and I was about halfway there. I could now walk without the spear with just a slight bit of pain. Man, Solar heal is the best. I hadn’t noticed its effects before, but I suspected it had been helping me ever since I arrived. Just the ability to recuperate at an sped up rate was a major boon. It also convinced me that if I survived the next few days. I would do everything I could to learn more about leveraging the system.

It was then that I heard Lana say the least favorite two words in the whole dictionary.

“Threat Detected.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The adrenaline I had been surviving enough wasn’t enough to keep me safe from the feeling of panic that was permeating my body.

What was it this time? I followed the red arrow, seeing a spec something in the distance. I applied my ocular vision and my mouth dropped.

The alpha bear, a freak covered in feathers, was pissed. Turns out that rubbing and clawing your eye with a taloned paw is not the smartest approach to cleaning out your eye. It had an festering slash through one of its eyes it must have happened when it was pawing at its face to remove the painful oils. The other golden eye, was perfectly aware and trained on me and the monster was running at me full speed.

That dirty monster had been stupid enough to scratch out its eye, but intelligent enough to get to higher ground and look for me. I closed my eyes one more time, trying to center myself. I didn’t need to engage Lana for a plan to know that I was screwed. Gazing up at the crevice, I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it there in time. The bear was moving too fast. My pepper was all used up too, so that clever ploy wouldn’t work a second time.

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Turning toward the ravine, I shook out my ankle, feeling a little pain, but not too much to keep from pressing forward. The dark crevice beckoned to me. What would normally be an ominous dark crack in the Cliffside was my only hope a survival. As I drew closer, the shadows of the cliff blocked out the sun’s light, which still hadn’t reached the zenith of the sky.

The crack was deep and led down into the earth. Focusing my hearing for any hint of what lay at the bottom of the ravine, I tossed a rock down. After a few seconds, it hit the bottom, causing an echo. Yep, that was definitely deep enough that if either of us fell down, we’d be dead.

My plan was simple. I would get close to the edge. If the bear rushed me, I would dive out of the way, then try to push it off balance with the spear to get it to fall into the ravine. Probably, wouldn’t work but it was my best chance.

That familiar ear-splitting shriek let me know the bear was close. I turned and braced myself. The panic I had felt earlier had dissipated, replaced with a strange sort of calm. Huh, guess fear is like any other emotion. Once you felt too much of it, you're just too tired to let it affect you anymore. I watched the beast; it was moving fast. It didn’t have trouble moving swiftly through the jagged stone’s surface of the broken earth. Stupid bear. Life was so unfair. Bracing myself, I waited for the right moment. This time the bear leapt at me, taloned paws outstretched. I dove to the side, rolling and spinning around as fast as I could manage.

“Shit!” The monster had already turned toward me, back against the ravine, swiping at me with a paw. I half dove, half scrambled out of the way of the massive paw whose terrifying talons clipped the edge of my calf, slicing through the edge of it the flesh. I cried out in pain as I he ground. Fire seared through my calf and I could hear the impact the talon made as it continued through the air sapping against stone, crumbling rocks falling down the ravine. In my haste to get away from the beast, I had almost fallen down the ravine, one of my arms and legs hanging over the ledge. I flipped over to my back, seeing as the bear raised its paw again to strike me down. Pushing myself up, I tried to crab walk out of the way but it was no use. As it came down toward, I did the only thing I could think of thrusting my spear toward the middle of the paw the impact of my spear didn’t even pierce the paw, the traitorous spear snapped only slightly changing the trajectory of the paw so that rather than gouging my throat. The bear sliced through my shoulder. I could hear the snap of a bone and blood sprayed out from my shoulder. Barely able to move it, my right arm was useless. It was over. I had failed.

The bear knew it too, because rather than swipe me again, it stood on its back paws to its full intimidating height, still gazing at me with its one golden eye. The feathered freak let out its piercing scream. Which seemed not only predatory but also joyous, as if it took great pleasure in my pain.

My traitorous body was giving out. I was losing consciousness after too much blood loss. My time on this planet was limited, and I knew what the bear was thinking. The blood-thirsty bear. I felt a pang of pity for myself. Why couldn’t it have just left me alone? What was wrong with this unfair universe, the system, Emily Cohan, the bear, any sentient being that took pleasure in the pain of others? It all just made me so angry. This was a cruel, cruel world. My pity transformed into rage. My body felt as though it was filled with fire, whiter and hotter than the sun.

I screamed at the bear at the top of my lungs, showing my defiance. The thing would kill me but I wouldn’t give it the satisfaction of seeing me afraid. The bear and I were looking at each other, shrieking and screaming at each other like a stupid contest of the wills. I strove to stand up, moving from a sitting position to a sort of crouched position, my useless right arm flopping to the side, blood pouring out. The bear screamed its fury.

At this moment, a strange thought passed through my mind. A stupid memory, or thing we used to do as teenagers. Back when I was in high school, my friends and I always joked about what the best way to die would be. As any stupid, testosterone filled teenager would, we always had to one up each other. One would say something like, “When I go it out, I hope it’s wrestling a crocodile with my bare hands in Australia.” Another would say. “I’ll go out fighting a pack of wolves with a baseball bat. A true warrior’s death.” Well, between those strange memories, my loss of blood and state of delirium. I knew something. I had a semi-delusional epiphany of sorts.

As I gazed up at the bear, and saw its angry, proud face. My anger rose once again at the injustice of the world. And one truth surfaced in my mind: I wasn’t anybody’s fucking trophy. With one last scream of desperation, I gripped a shard of my spear from the ground and jumped at the bear. I might die, but I was going to take its other eye. That would wipe that smug expression off the feathered freak’s face.

The bear must have been surprised because instead of swatting my broken body out of the sky, it backed up to avoid the shard of wood I was trying to stick in its eye. My leap of desperation and jab didn’t end up piercing its eye, rather it ended up with me between upright bears’ arms in some sort of semblance of tangled bodies. The bear had by retreating a step, dodged my attempt to gauge its eye, but in doing so it had stepped backward off the edge of the ravine. My dive towards its body had pushed it just enough to keep it off balance, and we both fell from the edge into the dark crack below. As we fell, I smiled to myself, thinking of my college friends. I should have said, “When I go, it will be fighting an alpha bear with nothing more than a shard of wood.” With that thought, I fell into the darkness.