Okay, self, let’s not fight pack predators in the future, thought Terry. Because this fucking sucks. He pressed a hand against his leg where one of the dire wolves had almost taken a piece out of him. He’d avoided that grisly outcome, but he still had a bunch of unbelievably painful puncture wounds in his leg where the damnable thing had bitten down. He also couldn’t tell if the intense burning in those punctures was some poisonous byproduct of the bite itself or his own weird body doing something to counteract the damage. Care to weigh in on whether that burning sensation is a bad thing?

Well, said other-Terry, didn’t you ever see any of those after-school specials?

“Not the time!” barked Terry.

Fine. I suspect that it’s your body working to heal the injury.

“You suspect?”

It’s not like I have direct access to your sensory impressions. I have access to your mind and memories. All that physical stuff isn’t really my domain.

Terry straightened up at that, which naturally put more pressure on his injured leg. He grimaced and shifted his weight to his other leg. He didn’t want to forget to ask what had just occurred to him.

“You sound like you’re an A.I. or something similar. Is that what you are?” asked Terry.

Part of him dreaded the answer, but another part of him was morbidly curious about the prospect of a functional artificial intelligence. It was kind of the holy grail of computer science and programming. If someone had actually cut the Gordian Knot on computer sentience and sapience, he was curious. That was someone he’d like to meet. He thought that through a little harder. Then again, maybe he didn’t want to meet that person. He'd been feeling pretty stupid since he arrived in Chinese Period Drama Hell. That, however, was almost entirely a result of unavoidable ignorance about the million pieces of common knowledge he didn’t have at his disposal. Artificial intelligence might not be his exact wheelhouse, but it was close enough. Meeting someone who could make him feel stupid about that didn’t sound like a good time. Other-Terry broke him out of that wool-gathering mode.

Of course, I’m not an A.I. This is a magical world. I’m a magical construct.

Terry frowned at that. It sounded pretty semantic to him.

“What’s the difference?”

Less silicon, said other-Terry without missing a beat. Also, I actually work properly. Trust me. You should be glad you didn’t end up in some system-controlled world. You think this is a Darwinian hellhole? You have no idea. Those system A.I.’s are right bastards. You would not have made it in one of those places.

“You don’t know that,” said Terry in a grumpy denial he didn’t believe.

Oh, but I do. As long as it took you to even start getting your head on straight here, you’d have been dead in those worlds fifty times over.

Terry wanted to object to that, but the magical construct was probably right. He had taken an absurdly long time to get his shit together after he arrived. It had only been dumb luck, a certain level of OP-ness, and a bit of fatalism that had let him survive that initial forest. Looking back, he still wasn’t entirely sure how he’d beaten that foliasaur. He was glad he’d done it, though. If Haresh, Ekori, and Jaban had tried their luck, that thing would have killed them all. Now that he was thinking about it, the Adventurer’s Guild would have been insane to even let them attempt it. Of course, that was assuming that there was a contract on it and not just a general bounty. Unless I’ve just gotten that much stronger since then, he mused. He didn’t feel like there was that big of a difference, but it was a really subjective thing to try to understand his own progress.

You should probably get moving again, suggested other-Terry. Those dire wolves haven’t just given up.

“Stupid pack predators,” Terry grumbled. “At least this isn’t a swarm trope. I should be glad for that”

The dire wolves weren’t that bad one-on-one, but he was rarely fighting just one. Even his enhanced senses and danger instinct couldn’t keep up when he was facing off against six or ten of the damn things. And those senses and that instinct weren’t infallible. He’d completely missed the lone dire wolf that had ambushed him and done that damage to his leg. The only reason he’d let himself linger for this long was that he’d managed to put a little distance between himself and the main pack. He did take a bit of satisfaction from the knowledge that the pack was substantially smaller than it had been. Even so, there were still plenty of them left to kill him if he got too sloppy.

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He looked around and then realized how futile that was. He had no idea where he was at the moment. He’d run a long way over the last couple of hours. Dozens of miles if he had to guess. At this point, he only had a general idea of the town’s direction. It had been the right choice to lead the pack away. Nobody in that town would have survived if this pack decided to descend en masse. Although, he supposed that probably wasn’t how pack predators worked. He had the impression that they didn’t want to fight equal or greater numbers, even if those numbers were weaker. It felt more like they wanted to isolate a member of the herd. That jived with vague recollections of documentaries he’d half-watched on TV as a kid.

Since he’d gone ahead and isolated himself for them, he expected that they’d keep tracking him. Plus, it seemed like everything in this world held a grudge. They might hunt him just for the pleasure of killing him at this point. He did seem to remember something about packs sticking to territories, but these things didn’t seem daunted by the distance they’d all covered. Either their territory was positively vast or they didn’t work quite the same way. Or you’re remembering wrong, thought Terry. There’s a reason nobody ever called you Mister Science. Terry was also a little concerned because he was starting to feel it a little.

It wasn’t fatigue or even real tiredness. He hadn’t felt those since the foliasaur but most of his fights since then had been short. He’d been moving slower than he might have to accommodate the others. In short, he hadn’t been pushed hard enough or for long enough to get tired. He wasn’t even sure how much sleep he needed any longer. He’d had the niggling idea that sleeping at all was mostly something he did out of habit rather than necessity. Not that he meant to give up sleeping, because sleeping was awesome. Sure, he had weird dreams about his old life sometimes which made him yearn for conveniences like processed sugar and high fructose corn syrup. It was still a nice break.

In the not-so-glorious now, though, he was starting to feel the faint edges of something he thought would eventually develop into tiredness. That much he did remember from those documentaries. Packs often brought their prey down by tiring them out. In a way, it was a relief to him to know he had practical limits. Nothing in his old life had ever prepared him for being superhuman. Even reading all those fantasy novels only offered so much insight. After all, those books were written by people who could imagine crushing rocks with their hands, but would never, ever have a visceral understanding of performing such feats. Not that he would have ever chosen being pursued by horse-sized dire wolves as the moment to discover those practical limits. That was just shit timing.

If he was coming up on being tired, though, that put a clock on this whole battle. He had to find a way to end it sooner than later. He tried for at least the fiftieth time to channel ice the way other-Terry had suggested. For a second or two, he felt a flickering something moving from his core toward his arm. Hope surged in him. Whatever energy had been shifting out of his core lost cohesion or got sucked back into the core.

“Fuck!” shouted Terry.

He needed something to change the status quo. This battle of attrition he had going on was probably winnable, but he didn’t like the probably part of it. He needed an ace up his sleeve to give him an edge.

Screaming is not a good way to avoid the dire wolves, said other-Terry in a severe, chiding tone.

As if the universe wanted to prove the point that temper tantrums were bad, three dire wolves bounded into view. Terry glanced up at the heavy branches overhead. He thought that those would prove a way to avoid the wolves, at least for a time, but it had turned out to be a bad idea. The teeth in those mouths had proven more than sufficient to chew away at the tree trunks and bring them down. It wasn’t an immediate process, but it was fast enough that the tactic was useless. Even so, he was tempted to jump up into them to extend his brief period of rest a little more and try channeling ice a few more times. Of course, he’d be stuck fighting the whole pack at once if he did that. If he didn’t succeed, it’d be even worse.

A more recent memory rose up of that fight with the bandits. He’d done something then. Something that worked at range. He hadn’t done it since then, but he thought he remembered how it felt. He tried to replicate that feeling, that sense of energy moving from his core and exploding into the world. Unlike channeling ice, that did work. Energy surged from his core and gathered in his hand. He punched out at the approaching dire wolves and that gathered power pulsed out. There was an empty moment before something slammed into the wolves’ legs. A hideous sound that Terry could feel as much as hear cracked through the air as bones broke.

He watched in fascinated horror as the wolves’ legs became misshapen, mangled things. They toppled over at speed. Two survived the fall. The third landed at just the right angle and at sufficient speed that it broke its neck. The other two were thrashing, howling, and snapping at nothing. It was pitiable in its way, but Terry hardened his heart to it. Rule number two, he reminded him. These things wouldn’t hesitate if you were injured. He marched over to the thrashing beasts and ended their lives with two quick slashes of his glowing jian. He pushed away the impulse to harvest their cores and set a fast pace away from the bodies. His leg still hurt but he ignored that pain. He’d keep ignoring it until he couldn’t anymore.

You can’t channel ice, but you can do that? Other-Terry sounded extremely put out to regular-Terry.

“Yeah. And?”

Nothing. I’ve just never met an idiot before.

“Don’t you mean an idiot savant?”

I do not.