A warm gust of air blasted Felix in the face, half waking him from a deep sleep. He groaned, adjusting his position and covering his eyes with one arm, hiding from the morning’s light. Another gust of air hit him. Somewhere, deep down in Felix’s sleep-addled brain, a thought emerged. The wind felt oddly wet and musty. It also smelled strange, like fish.
The sound of a can clattering on the ground finally got Felix to open his eyes. He looked out at the entrance of his shelter, and the sight there perplexed him.
A mottled pink and black tentacle-looking thing the size of a dog was knocking the red paint can over, pushing at it, as if trying to wedge itself inside. Felix couldn't figure out what it was until it retracted and the creature closed its mouth. It had been a tongue. An absolutely, impossibly massive tongue.
Felix’s heart froze in mortal terror as he beheld a brown furry snout of equally impossible proportions. The snout nudged the paint can again, exhaling once more from a giant black nose. Another warm gust of air filled Felix’s hovel.
I am so dead, thought Felix. One bite from that and I’m dead.
He wanted to cry again, but he also felt numb. The rollercoaster of emotions he’d experienced since his apparent death had left him wrung dry. Still, whatever passed for survival instincts in Felix screamed at him to get as far away as possible. The only problem was, the snout was blocking the only exit.
Ever so slowly, Felix began to reverse-army crawl backwards in his tunnel. Soon, his bare feet touched the assorted mud and stones along the back wall. He could go no further. He couldn’t even turn around and dig himself out the back. There simply wasn’t enough room for him to maneuver. He was stuck.
Maybe I can wait it out, thought Felix as he tried to keep his breath even and quiet. Whatever that thing is, it’s more interested in the fruit juices than me. It might leave on its own. It might even be an herbivore.
Felix watched in mute terror as, with a final huff, the snout opened again and sent its tongue lashing out to snap up the can, like a frog catching a fly. The mouth closed again, and this time Felix caught the flash of long sharp teeth.
Nope, definitely not an herbivore.
Felix could hear the gulp as the creature swallowed the metal can whole. Then the snout turned and filled up the entrance to Felix’s den. It began to snuffle, the wind generated from its rapid inhalation and exhalation threatening to collapse the whole structure.
Felix’s mind went into overdrive as he remembered the unique properties of his Rogue’s skill. Placing his foot against one of the stones along the back wall, he used the skills range to transfer it into his Rogue’s Inventory. Repeating the process, he managed to remove enough of the back wall to create an opening. He continued his backwards shuffle out the structure.
Once outside and in the morning sunlight, Felix peaked over the lip of the now tunnel. He regretted that decision almost immediately. The brown bear dwarfed any grizzly from Felix’s world by an order of magnitude, its body the size of a delivery truck.
Felix didn’t stand up. He turned and crawled on hands and knees away from the mega-bear, hardly daring to breathe. He got about twenty-five feet before a crashing sound told him the creature had finally managed to collapse his ramshackle home.
Silence. It felt deafening after all the noise of the bear’s snuffling and pawing. Against his better judgement, Felix turned to look.
The bear stared directly back at him. Felix thought he detected puzzlement and even curiosity in those golden-brown eyes. Then the bear pushed off the ground with its front legs, rising up and up. Standing there, a virtual wall of furry muscle, the bear let out a bellow that shook the very trees of the clearing.
Felix was up and running before he knew it, his body sending commands before his brain even had a chance to catch up. Several precious seconds of silence followed him, during which Felix sped away as fast as his legs could manage. Then a flurry of crashing started up, each footfall of the creature sounding like a landslide, telling Felix the bear was in hot pursuit.
From somewhere in Felix’s memory, a trivia fact popped into his head.
Grizzlies can run faster than horses over short distances. If that’s true for grizzlies, then…
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The crashing sounds behind Felix grew closer at an alarming rate, confirming his suspicions. The footfalls now felt more like mini-earthquakes. Felix knew he had to do something else, or he was going to die.
In the center of a small clearing ahead, Felix spotted a massive tree. It was wider and taller than the largest of the trees he’d seen so far, at least fifteen feet in diameter. Thick low branches sprung out every few feet all the way up its trunk. Felix put on a burst of extra speed as he ran towards it.
He launched himself onto the lowest hanging branch of the tree and began climbing with a speed and skill he didn’t realize he possessed. Within a few seconds, he was already twenty-five feet off the ground and still climbing. Then the delivery truck sized bear crashed into the base of the tree.
The entire tree shook violently, threatening to knock Felix off and send him tumbling to the ground. He held on for dear life, only looking down once the tree stopped shaking. Once again, the bear stared back at him. Then it wrapped its massive arms around the trunk of the tree, snapping the branches Felix had used as holds as if they were twigs, and began to climb.
Adrenaline was one hell of a performance booster, but even it had its limits. Felix was feeling those limits now. He tried to keep climbing at his earlier pace, but his arms were leaden weights, and his lungs felt like they would pop.
Meanwhile, the bear seemed in no particular rush as it lumbered up the tree. Despite its sedate pace, it was still gaining on Felix.
At a loss for what to do next, Felix desperately tried to think of some kind of solution. His Porter’s skill’s unique effect came to mind: Surge of Strength. A 300% increase to strength for five seconds seemed like one hell of a good thing at the moment. He activated it with a thought.
Felix felt every hair on his body stand up as an electric pulse ran through him, leaving behind an explosive energy he had never known. Muscles clenched, bulged, and hardened. He felt a moment of exhilaration as he rocketed up the tree, his hands and feet hardly touching each branch as he leapt to the next.
Evidently, the bear saw its quarry getting away and didn’t like that one bit. The tree began to shake again as the bear gave up its sedate climb in favor of a rapid shuffle up its trunk. Even with Felix’s increased pace, the intense shaking of the tree’s trunk from the bear’s passage soon made it impossible for him to climb further. He clutched at the tree’s trunk until the shaking stopped.
Looking up in terror, Felix saw that the bear’s snout was now directly in front of him. It looked down at him, tongue lolling. Then it turned its head and cracked open its maw, readying itself to bite Felix in two. Felix felt his end draw near. He also knew with intuitive certainty that his strength buff was about to expire.
Then, Felix did the only thing he could think to do. At the last moment, he leapt away from the trunk, dodging the snapping jaws by inches before catching a drooping branch with one hand. Summoning Arcadeus’s pen into his free hand, Felix stabbed down at the only part of the bear he could reach. Its big black nose.
The sharp tip of the fountain pen pierced through the surface of the nose with no resistance, all the way up to Felix’s grip. The bear let out a bellow filled with rage and surprise, losing its grip in its shock. It fell backwards, plummeting towards the ground, Arry’s pen still firmly lodged in its snout.
Felix didn’t have time to acknowledge his victory. The strength boost was gone, and a profound weakness took hold of him. He’d forgotten about the 50% strength debuff that happened once Surge of Strength ran out.
Now holding the branch with both hands, Felix tried to pull himself up. It was no use. Even without the debuff and in peak condition, Felix was hard pressed to do more than a couple pullups. Now, exhausted and weakened as he was, there was simply no way.
A thunderous cacophony of sound erupted as the bear hit the ground below, and the tree shook once more. Felix felt his grip starting to fail as he tried to weather the turbulence.
If only I was in better shape, thought Felix. He now regretted the fact that he had stopped working out during the pandemic. The resulting forty pounds of additional fat were not helping his situation.
If I just weighed a bit less, I could pull myself up.
That thought triggered a memory. His inventory weight modifiers. Felix realized he still had almost 25 lbs worth of extra weight on his body from the junk in his inventories. Briefly letting go with one hand, he angled his palm downwards and released every single item he carried.
Sticks, stones, plants, and one boulder the size of an EZ-Boy chair erupted from his hand, cascading down the side of the tree like a waterfall of debris.
Far below, the bear had risen. Shaking its head from the shock of impact, its tongue whipped out, curling around the pen still lodged in its snout. It tasted the iron tang of its own blood and bellowed its fury.
Then it noticed bits of stones and sticks falling around it. It looked up, towards its prey, just in time for a boulder the size of an EZ-Boy chair to come crashing into its forehead at an incredible velocity. The bear died before it could even process what was happening.
Up above, Felix still continued to cling to the branch for dear life, unaware of the bear's fate. Unfortunately, even without the extra 25 lbs weighing him down, he wasn’t strong enough to pull himself back up.
A ding he hadn’t heard before sounded in the back of his mind, followed by an oddly chipper androgynous voice.
Ding, “You have a new notification.”
Ding, “You have a new notification.”
Ding, “You have a new notification.”
Ding, “You have a new notification.”
Ding, “You have a new notification.”
Well that’s new, thought Felix. As soon as he completed the thought, his strength finally failed him. His grip slipped, and he began to tumble end over end towards the ground some 50 feet below.