While the burning pain in his leg did diminish over time, giving credence to the healing theory, it was also sapping his energy in a frankly alarming way. He supposed that was to be expected. Pain and healing were both fatiguing things in his old world, so it only followed that would hold annoyingly true in this new world. Of all the damn things, though, thought Terry. Why couldn’t that be the thing that wasn’t the same? He wanted to see it as another personal fuck you from Chinese Period Drama Hell, but he suspected that this was another of those things that weren’t connected to him. He was pretty sure it wasn’t even a trope. If non-hideously painful instant healing was a thing here, that would have been a trope. Of course, that would have been a trope of the best kind. A trope that was both helpful and useful. So, it naturally didn’t exist.

If Terry had been able to curl up in bed with a big bowl of chicken noodle soup and get in a quick twenty-two-hour cat nap, none of this would be an issue. He would have woken up tomorrow and been just fine or the next best thing to it. With an angry, vengeful pack of murder machines trailing him, however, getting tired was a serious problem. It might even be a fatal problem if he didn’t think of something cleverer than keep running and hope for inspiration. He had it on, well, not good authority but the authority of a lot of fiction that hope was not, in fact, an actual survival strategy. It worked great to get people excited and invested in things, which was a boon to productive activities. It did very little direct work on keeping people alive in a combat scenario.

Unfortunately, the only other option he’d come up with was to stand and fight. It was possible that he’d survive that if he tried it. The odds of surviving it without awful wounds that would make getting home all but impossible seemed a lot lower to him. Granted, he’d gotten through being in the forest while injured before, but he’d at least had some basic supplies with him. He hadn’t thought to bring along his pack of gear for this clusterfuck. He’d only expected to maybe find one or two monsters, which would only have taken a few hours to deal with. Why would I need a pack for that? I’m such an idiot. That’s going right on the list of things never to leave the house without again, he told himself.

Terry was so fixated on getting away from the dire wolves that he very nearly ran himself right off the edge of a cliff. It wasn’t a huge cliff. He thought it was maybe fifty feet. He briefly entertained the idea that he might be able to withstand jumping down that far. He decided that he needed a second opinion on that idea.

“What do you think? Will I live after a drop like that?”

Live? I expect you’d probably live, said other-Terry.

“That sounds like you think it’s a bad idea.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a bad idea. I just don’t know that it’s a good idea. I do think you’d live through it. I just wouldn’t want to guess about your condition after the fall.

“Again, that sounds like you think it’s a bad idea. Do you think I’d be badly injured?”

Did I not just say that I wouldn’t want to guess about your condition?

“You did,” admitted Terry.

Good. For a second there, I thought I must have hallucinated that part of the conversation. The truth is that I honestly don’t know if you’re durable enough to walk that off. On the one hand, it’s just gravity. There’s no magic there, just regular old physics, and you’re at least a partially magical being these days. That means that you’re generally less susceptible to injury and death from things like normal physics. Up to a point. On the other hand, it’s fucking gravity. Otherwise known as one of the least merciful of all natural forces in existence. It is not your friend. It’s nobody’s friend. So, yeah, you might walk away from the fall. Also, yeah, you might break both your legs, shatter your pelvis, and compress your spine like a loaf of white bread in a trash compactor.

“Oh man,” said Terry with a wistful note in his voice. “Do I ever miss white bread. Practically no nutritional value but that shit made for great peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

Focus!

“What? I’m hungry. In case you didn’t notice, I’ve been running at like gazelle speeds for close to five hours now. I’ve burned a few calories, and there’s not a taco truck in sight.”

Other-Terry went quiet for a second or two.

Okay, he acknowledged. That’s actually fair. Still, maybe not the best time for that discussion.

“I know. Those god damned dire wolves are going to catch up—”

No! They’re here!

Terry swung his gaze around in a desperate search for the pack. He didn’t see them, but he could hear them. Low growls almost beneath the threshold of even his magically-enhanced hearing reached his ears. While he’d been distracted with tiredness, hunger, and the possibility of leaping to potential escape, the wolves had closed the gap. Well, I think I’m kind of fucked.

Don’t be a jackass, retorted other-Terry. You can still fight. Hell, you can even try jumping. They damn sure aren’t going to follow you over the edge. They have better sense than that.

“Well, what do you recommend?”

Going back in time, trusting me not to turn you into a sociopath, and learning how to use your power.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“How about something I can do now,” said Terry before his brain stutter-stepped over an idea. “Wait. Can I really do that? Go back in time?”

No! You cannot go back in time!

“Why not?”

Because reasons! Head in the game, Terry!

“Okay. Okay. So, jump or fight?”

There was a pregnant pause during which Terry could feel that other consciousness in his head thinking hard or running calculations or pondering the mysteries of cottage cheese for all he knew. When other-Terry finally did weigh in, he sounded very reluctant.

Fight.

“Why do you sound so unenthused about that?”

Probably because you’re bound to get hurt, and then the whining will be endless.

“Thanks for the pep talk, coach.”

Do I look like a cheerleader to you? Go kill some wolves. Try using this life-or-death situation to have that epiphany about channeling ice. At least, then, some good might come out of all of this.

“Oh my god, you’re like a broken clock,” muttered Terry.

Before other-Terry could chime in again, Terry sent another of those fist blast things at a spot where he was pretty sure a couple of the dire wolves were hiding. Their pained howls told him he was right. I guess this is where it gets bloody. Taking a deep breath, he drew a jian and pressed some power into it. It took on that red glow again. I really wish I knew what I actually was doing with that. If I did, maybe I’d feel a little less Sith-ish. Then again, maybe that’s what I need right now.

“Alright, you overgrown basset hounds. Let’s get this done.”

Terry planted a foot and shot back into the forest proper. No sooner was he in among the trees than a dire wolf lunged for his leg. The same one that had gotten bitten earlier. Oh no, you don’t, thought Terry. He executed a sliding turn that let him sucker punch the wolf so hard that some of its teeth shattered and it stumbled away with blood flying from its mouth. Since he knew that these things liked to coordinate their attacks, he slashed blindly behind him. He felt the telltale resistance of the sword passing through something and hot blood splashed his back and neck. That’s never going to stop being disgusting. He completed the three-sixty spin and uppercut a wolf that was jumping over one that missing the top half of its head. It was not lost on him that the uppercut would have failed if these things had been normal-sized wolves. Of course, I wouldn’t have had to run from normal wolves.

You didn’t have to run from these wolves. It was just the smarter course of action, noted other-Terry.

“I don’t need color commentary,” growled Terry. “This isn’t a basketball game.”

You’ve never watched a basketball game in your life.

“Not the point!” shouted Terry as he dove to put some distance between himself and the latest attacker.

Things went okay for a while, as he dodged, slashed, and punched his way through some of the dire wolves. At one point, when the fight drifted back near the cliff, he even kicked one right out into open air. The look of panicked surprise in the wolf’s eyes might even have been a little funny if he’d been given a chance to enjoy it, but the other wolves demanded his immediate attention. In the back of his mind, he even let himself start to think that he might win this thing. He wasn’t killing all of the wolves fast. He was killing them, though.

But the phrase brought down by sheer numbers sprang abruptly to mind when he misjudged a thrust and those glossy teeth snapped shut around his forearm. He immediately lost his grip on the jian and it fell to the ground, no longer giving off the simultaneously eerie and comforting glow. The wolf jerked at his arm. The pain was incandescent, blotting out everything else in the world. By the time he regained any sense of sanity, he was standing over the mutilated body of a wolf, his chest heaving, and a blinding rage coursing through him.

Everything after that became a haze of animalistic violence, and the wounds started to stack up. They were small cuts and tears at first, but his greatest defense had been disciplined violence and tactical retreats. Sanity came back to him when a wolf actually took a piece out of his thigh. He crashed to the ground, adding his own howls of pain to those of the dying wolves around him. His vision cleared as his thought took on some semblance of order again. He tried to stand. He thought he still had the strength for that, but the explosion of agony from his leg sent him back to the ground. He looked around and spotted four wolves cautiously closing on him. He considered using the fist blast move again, but he knew he’d never get all four before they got him. He was supremely confident that he didn’t get bonus points for only being torn apart by two dire wolves instead of four.

“I don’t suppose that channeling ice will let me kill all four of them, will it?”

Yes! Other-Terry sounded extremely exasperated. Why do you think I’ve been harping on it for the last five or six hours? Funsies?

“Do or die time, I guess.”

Terry gave the task his undivided attention. He still didn’t understand what he was supposed to do. I don’t really understand how the fist blast thing or the glowy sword thing works either. Maybe, I don’t need to understand. He’d never understood that crowd that implicitly bought into the idea that knowledge was somehow the enemy. That just seemed stupid. Even so, he also didn’t think that he was even remotely smart enough to have a stranglehold on truth. People had correct intuitions about stuff all the time. There had to be something to all that mysticism that centered on feeling your way to enlightenment. If he couldn’t just brute force it, and he lacked the knowledge to do it, maybe he could just feel his way through it. Sort of like the fist blast, only with ice, he thought.

It felt like it took an eternity, even if he knew it was only a second or two, but a trickle of something cold, horribly, deathly, impossibly cold, seeped out of his core. He felt like it was going to leave his insides flash-frozen. He didn’t fight it, though. He leaned into the feeling. After all, he was dead either way. That moment of acceptance seemed to open a gate inside of him, and the trickle became a torrent that rushed toward his hands. He didn’t try to direct it. He just held up his hands and let whatever was going to happen, happen. All of that cold rushed out of him in one tremendous burst. The temperature dropped so fast that he instinctively closed his eyes against it. Then, there was just a crackling noise all around him. Terry waited for jaws to clamp down on him but none came. He hesitantly opened his eyes and found a world coated in ice an inch thick, including four dire wolves.

“Are those things dead?” he asked in an exhausted voice.

Oh, they’re dead, said other-Terry.

“Thank god,” murmured Terry.

He tried to stand again, made it part way up, and then flopped backward when the pain overcame him. It took him a moment to realize that his head was hanging off the cliff’s edge. He hadn’t even realized they were that close again. He saw something down below that he couldn’t quite make sense of from his upside-down perspective. He made himself roll over and look again. Once he understood what he was seeing, he pushed himself back from the edge and let his face rest against the chilled stone. Down below and set what was probably a couple of miles from the cliff was a camp. A big one. A big fucking camp of what looked like monster soldiers.

“Screw you, Chinese Period Drama Hell. You and the trope you rode in on.”