"What the fuck" were the first words which immediately came out of Arthur's mouth as soon as he woke up. In his defence, it was a completely justified and almost too mild of a reaction for someone who just awakened to the sensation of dew-wet grass and a slight breeze in the air.

Not weird at all if the day prior he'd went camping out in the woods and decided to sleep out under the star-filled sky. Unfortunately, he had as usual gone to sleep in his comfy bed and then woken up somewhere else, not at all something he expected or even wanted to happen. Well, maybe just a little bit, but it was only the usual escapism and daydreaming, no more than that.

Arthur looked around at the wide grassy plain he woke up in, still sitting in the middle of nowhere with only his pyjamas and nothing else to his name, and as a part of his mind wondered how this place was incredibly empty with no other form of life apart from the vividly green grass and a few other herbaceous plants he did not recognize, he realized that he had more than a few problems in his hands.

Unless this was a dream, and no matter how strange the situation it was all too real for it to be a possibility, he had no idea how he would survive in the long term without readily available food, water and shelter, which seemed to be pretty lacking here. Wherever here was.

As he sat there thinking on his next move, the grass streamed away from him, migrating to better pastures while swaying in the cool breeze and shining under the sun high in the sky. He looked down at his hands, palms pristine and with barely a callus on their surface, he wondered if maybe he should have picked up farming and gathering in his previous life. Considering how fast the grass and other plausible foodstuff was running away from him, it would have been useful to-

“Wait. What?”

Indeed, as he looked around and confirmed that it hadn’t been just an illusion, the vegetation around him was moving away, streaming like a huge school of fish with their dorsal fin sprouting out from the water surface.

He stood up and froze, completely unsure about what to do. Then, he saw the golden sands, the great desert and its promise of sure death if he let the only oasis of life in the world get away from him, and he started running like his life depended on it. Which it's very likely it did, considering the grass had started accelerating, and the dunes were coming closer and closer to him, and he realized that the splotch of grass he had found himself on wasn't as boundless as he had first thought. Rather, the scorched land behind him was the true face of the world he found himself on, and if it was even half as hot as it looked he would be cooked before the day was over.

So he ran and then dashed when he realized his speed was no match for the mass migration occurring around him. As sweat began pouring from his forehead and his breath started coming out in puffs and gasps of air, even as the pace of the moving grass started levelling off and stopped accelerating further, he realized that there was no way for him to move fast enough or even keep up his current speed.

He sank to his knees, his mad dash for survival cut off just a handful of minutes after it began, and soon enough his legs sunk an inch deeper into the sand, the green spot of salvation disappearing in the horizon.

It had all happened so fast that he was almost knocked to the ground when the wind changed, the gentle and cool breeze disappearing together with his oasis of hope, replaced by a strong gale of hot air blowing armfuls of sand into his face. He sputtered the sand from his mouth and pulled up his arms to protect his face from the small sandstorm forming around him, then he stood up and staggered away, searching for cover from the wind.

He found none, but it didn’t matter so much since the storm passed in all of two minutes. Arthur speculated it was probably formed by the changed in temperature between the safe zone and the desert around it, though he was far from an expert in meteorology and he doubted even an expert would be able to make a conjecture on clearly unnatural phenomena.

He left the trail of thought die off since it wasn't really useful to his immediate survival and started walking in the direction where the grass had moved on, his best bet to find a place that was not filled with only sand. He regretted even considering the plain of grass empty, since here sand was literally the only thing in every direction.

Hold that thought. Arthur veered off slightly towards an object on the ground he had caught from the corner of his eyes. As he neared the object, which turned out to be a piece of some kind of sandstone the size of his fist, he almost wanted to laugh; to think that a rock would be the most interesting thing to him was a pretty sad thought.

Crouching down he grabbed the rock with his right hand, turning it over to weight it, and at that moment he went through more emotions than he thought was possible in such a short amount of time. In the span of a second, he went from surprise when he noticed the back of his hand had a turquoise gem stuck into it occupying a third of its surface, to confusion as he felt a rush of air just above his head after crouching down, to abject terror as he raised his eyes and met the multi-faced gaze of an enormous praying mantis the same colour of the sand it was emerging from.

He had just enough time to look up and wonder how close he had been from being decapitated by the thing, before a part of his mind he had forgotten was even there screamed at him with all its might, and he jumped back and away from the monster, rock still clutched in his fist. Just in time too, he thought, as he felt one of the bladed appendices nip the bridge of his nose.

If he had been terrorized before, then now he was just a couple seconds away from wetting himself. Forget running after fleeing vegetation, he had no chance to keep up with something like this. He could barely follow its movements, the only thing he could do was guess and-

Another swing, this time accompanied by the whole body of the enlarged insect and propelled by a fast buzz of its swing. Arthur threw himself bodily to his left, but this time he felt a hot and at the same time numb feeling of something slashing his skin and flesh as the mantis cut him just below his left shoulder, ripping away the sleeve of his cotton shirt.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

He shouted out in pain as his arm started bleeding a great deal and sand started snaking into the wound. Even as he recovered from the spike of pain and tried to manage the constant stinging, the lizard in his brain jumped on the controls again, and he made the unfortunate decision of combat rolling away from another attempt on his life. Unfortunate because he decided to throw himself on his injured side, and also because he had no idea how to perform a combat roll, so he just threw himself and hoped he wasn’t going to break his neck.

Just as he was recovering after crumpling to the ground, he caught another flash, but there was little he could do in his current prone position. Arthur just hoped death would come swiftly and this wasn’t the type of insect which liked to play with his prey after it was unable to fight back.

As he observed the bladed arm descend on him in slow motion, he had just about enough time to react as what looked like an ivory spear tip sprouted from the abdomen of the monster mantis that was about to end his life. He scrambled back and away as the latter yanked itself from the weapon that had attacked it from behind and turned around to face its new opponent.

Arthur realized with another bout of despair that what he had seen was not a spear, but the stinger of another massive monster, this time the remake of a scorpion coloured in ivory paint, as if its exoskeleton was made completely out of bone. While the new monster, without accounting for his stinger, reached the same height of two meters as the praying mantis, it was on a completely different scale since it was three times its volume overall.

As the two creatures started eyeing each other out, Arthur slowly moved back towards a dune high enough to hide behind, from which he could observe the fight. He had no illusions that he could run far away enough from the monster that came out on top, so his only hopes were either the two cancelling each other out, the winner forgetting about him or that he could glean something useful from the fight.

He had just enough time to hide behind a dune and lie down to become one with the sand as much as possible when the mantis made the first move. It moved to the right, jumping with his left legs and moving its wings enough to manoeuvre a few meters into the air.

Unfortunately for it, as soon as it landed, the scorpion quickly moved a pincer forward and cut blindly, severing one of the mantis left legs. Not to be outdone, the mantis cut the thick skin on the body of the scorpion, drawing a trickle of green blood.

After the two traded a couple more blows, it quickly became obvious that the mantis, slowed down from the critical hit it was inflicted to the abdomen at the start of the fight was on the losing end, and soon it crumpled to the ground dead from the blood loss and trauma it had received.

Arthur kept completely still from behind the crest of the dune, hoping the hunch he had during the fight was right and the monster would not be able to spot him. As the victor ate through the spoils of the fight, quickly devouring the body of the defeated after nipping away the few remaining appendages, he held his breath, only sneaking a few quick breaths once in a while as he waited.

Sweat quickly accumulated on the surface of his body, soaking his clothes, although whether that was because of the scorching sun or from fear he wasn’t sure. He sure hoped the thing didn’t have a sense of smell, because if it did then he was already dead.

Luckily his fears soon dissipated when, after a few seconds of standing stock still in the sand, the scorpion turned around and headed to the direction it had come from. In the distance, a couple hundred meters from the battlefield, Arthur saw it started burrowing and it disappeared from sight. If he wasn’t terrified of what lied in the sands before, he sure was now.

Arthur had suspected from observing the fight that the Scorpion, now with a capital letter to indicate that was what he had decided to call it until he saw a normal-sized one, couldn't actually see and relied on vibrations or whatever have you to sense his surroundings. A suspicious proved even more true after it hadn't spotted him in his hiding spot and it had decided to burrow in what was obviously a trap.

He descended the dune as he thanked the heavens that he had been right, else he would have probably been very dead. While the Scorpion wasn’t as fast as the Mantis, it was still very much faster than Arthur, who while not completely out of shape still wasn’t in peak human performance.

As he arrived in the centre of the battlefield and the adrenaline wore off, his head started feeling faint, and before he could wonder why that was, he noticed his arm was almost completely covered in blood. His blood, which was still trickling out from the wound he had gotten from his desperate scramble with the Mantis, together with the blood coming from the scratch on his nose.

He quickly reached for the sleeve that had been torn off from his shirt, still lying on the ground nearby, and ripped it in an attempt to make some kind of bandaging. It was barely passable, but he didn't have much choice as he tied it around the wound, tight enough to stem the blood, but not enough to lose the arm. Hopefully, he wouldn't lose it because of an infection, but it's not like he had anything to disinfect or clean the wound with, so there was no point thinking about it at the moment.

After finishing up his crude bandaging, he ripped off the other sleeve, and after some debating decided to take off his shirt completely and fashion it around his head like a turban of sorts. He’d quickly decided that he preferred to suffer from sunburns rather than die of heatstroke, so that was that.

Then, he gathered up the two blade arms of the Mantis and two of the legs that had been left behind after the Scorpion had had its fill. Although Arthur wasn't very hungry yet, after all the running and sweating he had done in the last hour he had started to be very thirsty. As such, he decided to take drastic measure, not seeing an alternative in the form of an actual water source.

He took one of the legs of the monster and started digging with his right hand where the appendage had been cut off, quickly bringing a handful of green sludge to his mouth before he could regret his decision. The acrid, tangy taste of the meat and the awful slimy feeling of it was enough to make him gag, but he decided he wasn't feeling stupid enough to actually vomit and he finished fishing out all he could from it before going through the remaining three extremities.

Even if the flesh didn’t taste acidic and hadn’t melted his tongue yet, he still feared it would turn out to be deathly poisonous. Again, he didn’t see other options, and it was the best he could do to hydrate himself.

He tied the legs and one of the bladed arms together with his sleeve, keeping out one of the latter to use as a weapon and give himself more of an edge in the next scramble for survival.

Setting everything aside he turned his attention to the last thing he wanted to check before getting the hell as far away as possible from the giant ivory Scorpion he knew still lurked in the sands.

His right hand turned over, exposing the turquoise gem he had kept glancing at for a while now. A faceted gem, seven sides exposed to the outside and reflecting the light from the sun beautifully, luckily it wasn't transparent, so he couldn't see his flesh and bones laying under its surface. He had no idea how it even fit and honestly wasn't sure if he even wanted to know.

The fingertips of his left hand brushed the surface of the gem almost involuntarily, and as he saw the air tremble above it, he couldn’t contain himself anymore.

“Motherfucker.”