Life was hard in the deep wyld when you couldn’t freely utilize your squirrel boots. It had been quite a while since Gloe had relocated, and he still couldn’t say he was prospering. He had managed to stay ahead of straight up poverty and starvation for months, but his margin was improving slowly. Almost glacially.

He hadn’t had any new aura breakthroughs, and any improvements in his home or gear were merely incremental. He spent a lot of time and energy just repairing or replacing what he had as it wore out. Without extensively using his boots he couldn’t ambush monsters either, so he was relying mostly on traps. That meant a lot of work building, repairing and checking them. It also meant he hadn’t been leveling up.

Still, he was surviving. No use being negative. Things could be a lot worse. They had in the past. They likely would in the future. Best to keep working hard and just appreciate what he had. He’d done a good job today, all things considered. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil therein.” Time for a good night’s sleep.

...

Gloe started awake. He wore his hat to bed, and his enhanced senses had sounded an alarm significant enough to jolt him to alertness. He didn’t know what precisely…there was something fiddling with his door. Something big, but quiet. And purposeful.

He’d never gotten around to digging a second exit. Hadn’t been able to figure out how to monster-proof it. That was a shame. He squirmed as upright as his cramped home would allow, bringing his axe to a ready position. He slept with it every night, and it was a real comfort at the moment. Really made up for the all the times he’d rolled over it in his sleep.

As he came more awake he realized he was regenerating. He’d started pulling in energy while still half-asleep. Shit. He looked up, wondering if his axe was powerful enough to cut a hole in the bush. Against a monster he was reluctant to ruin his sanctuary, but there were not many reasons someone with emotions would be out here trying to break into his home, and none of them were likely to be good.

Not just someone with emotions either. Whoever was out there was awash with feelings. Drowning in them. It reminded Gloe of the penal camp he’d grown up in, but that had been coming from multiple lifers condemned to work and die on the frontier. Granted, his range had been a lot shorter then. But still.

Something outside spiked, faster than he could draw it off. There was a sudden roar, and the door vanished, a huge mass shooting itself down the narrow tunnel despite the thorns that lined it. It was fast. Gloe swung at it with all his might as soon as it was in range.

There was no space to dodge. His foe took the axe dead on, and flew backwards, taking a good portion of the bushes that formed the tunnel with him. Gloe didn’t check to see what became of him, just slipped on his boots, grabbed his emergency pack and fled.

No time for caution. It was dark, and drawing attention was dangerous. So was the ground. So were the treetops. Clearly the most hazardous thing out here tonight was his pursuer though. At least to him. So he darted from branch to branch, recklessly dashing from tree to tree despite the low visibility. It wasn’t safe, but it was fast.

The emotions were still back though. His ability more or less sucked in pain and emotions from a radius around him. He’d gained a little control over the years, but not much. Probably because he hadn’t been leveling up. He could focus on a particular person but it took a great deal of concentration. He couldn’t exclude specific individuals, and he only had minimal control over which emotions he ate.

The fact was his ability was fairly binary, like an omni-directional vacuum that was either on or off. Except for overwhelming feelings. He could sort of ‘taste’ the emotions and pain as they came in, but it was fairly hazy and indistinct. He only had the vaguest sense of origination. Maybe that would change eventually, if he survived.

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At the moment though he only had an unreliable sense that his pursuer was behind him. And drawing closer. Gloe took the energy he was gaining and used it to take even more chances in order to increase his speed. He attempted jumps he barely was able to clear, flailing and straining to make them work.

It probably wasn’t going to be enough. He summersaulted in the air, trying to catch sight of who was behind him. His hat didn’t give him much in the way of night vision, but there was something back there, moving through the treetops behind him, stealth abandoned. It was fast, but it wasn’t redman. It was big. He’d thought perhaps his impression had been biased by the tight quarters of his old home, but that hope was apparently in vain.

No sense trying to fight something that quick and large. Maybe he could outlast it. Just keep fleeing, that was the play. He put all his focus into escaping, everything he had in each rush and leap, confident his ability would supply what was needed for the next.

It was the fastest Gloe had ever gone, but the energy kept increasing. Whatever was back there was getting closer, and angrier. It wasn’t stopping.

Gloe should have been desperate, and in fact his body and mind had been trying to have a panic attack since the first moment his attacker began to break into his home. He wasn’t having any of that though. He could still feel fear, the panic, even the despair, and he acknowledged them as perfectly valid and rational responses. He was in a bad situation, and odds were it wasn’t going to end well. He would not have wanted to be without those feelings, as hard as they were to bear. They conveyed critical information and were integrally linked to the traits that made him human- extrapolation, anticipation, sympathy, imagination. All frequently generated negative emotions, and he never wanted to impair the former by negating the latter.

At the same time, emotions made good servants but poor masters. His negative emotions were messengers that helped him comprehend the magnitude of the dire straits he was in, but if he let them run rampant they would plaster the inside of his mind with warnings of doom until he lost the ability to act to forestall anything. He thanked them for their hard work, endured the ongoing discomfort their presence brought, but refused to be overwhelmed. His ability siphoned off the excess and left him clear to make a good decision.

That was useful even in a case like this, where there were no good options. He was able to make his peace with that fact, and choose the best bad choice, resigning to comporting himself as well as possible rather than flailing around in terror. He would keep striving until the end. If something terrible happened, so be it. If he died, he died. He continued running, even as the snapping branches and growls behind him drew abreast.

A dark form loomed suddenly, crashing into Gloe from the side. He fell, snatching at several branches before finally catching one, spraining his arm in the process. Undeterred he dropped to the dimly seen branch below to continue fleeing, but his attacker was relentless. It dropped on him from above, precipitating another fall as Gloe attempted a lurching dodge. He broke his other arm recovering from that one, slowing him enough that the next charge hit him dead on.

The two plummeted to the forest floor. Gloe was on the bottom, and he felt the terrible impact reverberate throughout his body. He gasped for air as he tried to assess the damage. Too much pain. He could push past the paralyzing effects, but his limbs weren’t responding properly, and the sensation data was too much for him to sort through instantaneously. He needed a minute.

He didn’t have one. Rage was rushing off the beast atop him. “You’ll never raise this hand against me again you piece of shit!” It bit his right hand off, spat it on the ground next to him and roared in triumph. Gloe started to shake as a volley of blows rained down on him.

He’d never taken this much damage so quickly before. He was devouring his own pain and emotion as well as everything he could off of his volatile opponent, but it wasn’t enough. The incoming energy was being burned off as quickly as it came in. He had extensive but undetermined existing damage, with more incoming all the time. His regeneration was by default general and applied uniformly across his whole body. Normally that was good, as it solved issues he wasn’t even aware of before they became real problems. At the moment though fatigue and minor abrasions were getting the same priority as broken bones and internal bleeding.

Through trial and error he had learned in the past how to focus the regeneration, allowing him to more rapidly heal his most severe or debilitating injuries one at a time. At the moment though he didn’t dare try to do that. His insides hurt, a lot, but the feelings weren’t specific enough for him to rely on. He feared massive internal injuries, and he didn’t dare take his regeneration off of everything else to concentrate on one.

So he just lay there and took it, hoping his limbs would start responding before the monster atop him beat him to death. It wouldn’t stop. It didn’t stop. Everything went black.