At first, Terry just had to focus on doing what he could to heal up. That meant dragging himself far enough away to find some dire wolves there weren’t frozen straight through. It wasn’t really that far, maybe a hundred feet, but it felt like ten miles to Terry on his injured leg. Slipping and falling three times did nothing to help that. Once he found something other than wolfsicles, he went digging for cores. He even found a few and, mercifully, he was able to absorb them. That seemed to supercharge his already fast healing, which was a mixed blessing. Yes, his leg stopped hurting so much. Unfortunately, the entire area where the wolf had torn a chunk out started itching like crazy. Not just the skin that regrowing at a nearly visible pace, but the flesh that was reforming inside his leg was itchy. Talk about having an itch you can’t scratch, thought Terry. This is maddening.
Next, he built a fire, which was an achievement in itself since he hadn’t brought any flint with him. He’d ultimately been forced to do the old spin the stick to generate heat thing. Other-Terry had been babbling about channeling fire, but Terry couldn’t think straight long enough to do anything with that. It had been everything he could manage just to find some dry wood and spin the stick. He suspected that the process went easier than it would have back on his old world, but he didn’t care about that at all in the face of a nearly all-consuming hunger. Once the fire was going, there was the matter of food. He settled on the easiest fix. He made primitive wolf kabobs.
Terry considered the meal he was cooking and admitted to himself what it was. Yeah, that’s just meat on a stick. Kabobs have vegetables on them, he thought, or they should, damn it! He realized that thought was a little crazed and there wasn’t much he could do about it. He was so hungry. His stomach had been making grumbling noises nonstop for a while. It was everything he could do to stop himself from just seizing the half-cooked meat from the spit and eating it that way. That gnawing, aching, desperate need for food drowned out just about everything else. For most of an hour, he just stared at the slowly charring meat without really thinking about anything.
Finally, inevitably, he couldn’t make himself wait any longer. He seized the spit and started taking huge bites out of the meat. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had a sense of what he must look like. He’d been covered with blood, some of it the wolves, some it his own. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was eating meat that could only generously be called cooked. There were dire wolf corpses littering the area around him. Bloody juices were dripping off his face as he ate the meat. It looked like he’d gone on a killing spree and then plopped down in the middle of the carnage to have himself a nice meal, caveman style. He was vaguely consoled by the fact that he was so hungry that he wasn’t even really tasting the meat itself, which was probably a blessing in disguise. Supposedly, it was the fat that made meat taste good, and he hadn’t noticed much fat in the wolf meat.
When he’d eaten what had to have been pounds of meat, the yawning chasm of need that had swapped places with his stomach for a while was sated. Rational thoughts that did not revolve around hunger or dealing with hunger started to creep into his mind. He pushed them away at first because he didn’t want to deal with them, yet. He tentatively stood and put some weight on his injured leg. He knew it wasn’t fully healed yet because it was still itching like crazy, but it supported his weight without making him want to flinch, cry, or curl up into the fetal position. He considered that good progress. He went back to where there had been a small kingdom of ice earlier. Much of the ice had melted away in the summer weather, but there were still more than a few well-shaded trees that bore a coating of ice. He wasn’t really worried about the trees. He was looking for the jian he’d dropped when that wolf bit his arm.
It took him a while to find it. He’d only had a vague sense of where he’d dropped it to begin with, and the fight had ranged a lot farther than he thought it had. So had his impromptu ice storm. There was destruction to the local vegetation that stretched for close to half a mile. It was only his extra speed that made the task something that didn’t require a team and days of effort. After he dragged the sword out from beneath a dead dire wolf, he dried it off as well as he could. He wasn’t sure if stainless steel was a thing in this world, so he didn’t want to invite his trusty weapon to rust away on him. After all, who the hell knew what melting magical ice would do to regular metal?
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Terry conceded that he could probably pose the question to other-Terry, but he didn’t care enough about the answer to do that. Not yet, at any rate. That other personality had done more talking in one day than it had in months, and it was kind of acerbic for Terry’s tastes. If he was less tired and closer to the comforts of his own home, he might have felt differently about it. He decided he could do without the snark as things stood. He also took the time to harvest cores from the wolves until he reached a point where he couldn’t absorb any more of them. He wasn’t sure how he knew he was done. He just knew.
He was wildly disappointed that he didn’t have head sack with him, not that he could have fit all those heads in there even if he tried. Head sack had proven itself very durable, but Terry recognized that he’d need a tarp or a cart to get all those heads back to town to turn in. A task he meant to accomplish soon because those damn wolves had to be worth something and he was getting mighty short on cash again. He’d never really been easy come, easy go with money in his old life. He’d been more of a save-for-a-rainy-day kind of guy. He’d been so distracted by everything when he first arrived that money had been a very means to an end thing. With at least a semi-permanent place to sleep at his disposal, that need for money had started to weigh on him again.
Feeling that he didn’t have any more excuses, Terry very grudgingly walked back over to the cliff and looked out at the valley below. Specifically, he looked at the spot where he’d seen that camp before. Like a sink full of dirty dishes that you hoped would have washed themselves, the camp was still there. It was still filled with what looked like monsters, although even Terry’s enhanced vision could pick out the details. He just knew what a human shape looked like, and the things down there didn’t have it. He also knew uniforms when he saw them, and those things were wearing them. He spent most of a minute just glaring at the scene below before he turned his gaze skyward.
“Goddamned, motherfucking deus ex machina! The granddaddy of all bullshit tropes! You’re dropping that on my head?”
Terry could almost feel god, or whatever passed for god in this isekai shitshow, looking down at him and giggling like a maladjusted junior high student with a magnifying glass and a convenient ant hill. He’d spent months of his new life traveling south just to avoid a war. He’d finally found a place that wasn’t filled with hateful people he wanted to avoid at all costs. He’d gotten himself a house. All of that, just to find monster soldiers camped uncomfortably close to his new home. True, they weren’t that close in objective terms. He’d been running from those wolves for hours. Still, he didn’t imagine it would take a lot of marching for those things to make it to where he was living. There were more than enough of whatever those things were to raze the town to the ground. He estimated that there had to be a few hundred.
The real problem wasn’t the camp he was looking at. He couldn’t get any sense of how strong those things were at his present distance, but he suspected a large party of rank three and a few rank two adventurers could clear out that camp. The problem was that where there was one camp of soldiers, there were bound to be other camps of them. And this army wasn’t some abstraction that he’d only heard about, like the army of evil to the north. This army was right in front of him. Unavoidably present and visible to his eyes. In a place where he wanted to stay and not have anything to do with the stupidly pretty people. He knew he could just leave again, but where would he go? If there were enemy soldiers here, they could be anywhere. Terry let his head droop.
“Son of a bitch. I’m going to have to do something about this, aren’t I?”
Other-Terry chose that moment to reassert his existence and asked, Are you just now figuring that out?
“I really don’t like you,” said Terry.
You think I’m living the dream in here? Fat chance.
Shaking his head and checking the position of the sun in the sky, Terry sighed and started trudging in the direction of the town. He’d be walking all night to get back there before the others started to worry. And they won’t even be worrying about the right thing, thought Terry.