It was a horrible rest, really. The kind you’d have following stormy autumn days where you had spent too much time playing outside yesterday and you felt so tired and hot and cold that you didn’t know what to do with yourself. And your mum who was happy to have an excuse to be home would give you something warm and tasty to eat but you were too tired to eat it so you just fell asleep.

And when you slept you’d feel so hot but if you took off your covers you were so cold and nothing you did would ever truly remove that coldness, even if you felt like you were sleeping on a bed of hot coals. You just trashed and turned and sweated like an olympic athlete and in the end you would wake up alright because you were a kid and kids can bounce back from those kinds of things. An adult can’t. Adults go to the hospital for acute respiratory failure and have to spend the rest of their lives slightly breathless.

Lying in the depths of a pit and rolling to and fro really gave me a nuanced perspective on how nice it is to have someone else care for you.

I wake up in short bursts of activity fueled by pain and desperation. Those short bursts of wakefulness instil in me the thought that the next time I go to sleep, I won’t wake up again. But I do.

Lesser Regeneration has reached Level 4

Slowly, I start to recover.

I come to with a startle. My fur is drenched in sweat but I already know that going to wash off in the river is probably not the best idea. The smell down here is worse than ever. I’m honestly starting to consider throwing out the deer completely. This is why foxes don’t hunt elephants, I guess.

Digging a hole and putting the prey in it wouldn’t be all that bad if that would keep it cold enough to stave off decomposition, but it kind of doesn’t. There’s just a whole lot more bacteria down here. One thing I could do would be to cook, salt or ferment the stuff I hunt, but all three of those are unlikely.

Cooking would be neat if it didn’t arise so many problems. I can’t be sure whether or not spirit/ghost-like creatures would notice it, but I do know that any nearby humans would definitely want to come check it out. As I am right now, interacting with humans is not desired. I’d like to, of course, but the problem is in the communication.

I can’t talk. Sure, I can make a few different kinds of sounds, but none of these are sophisticated enough to form into words. I can growl and scream and sneeze. But not talk. Combined with my appearance, meeting with a human at this moment would either cause conflict or force me into fleeing. Cooking or making a fire is a no-go.

Me getting salt? Next to impossible: there is no nearby sea and I don’t have any proper techniques to extract it from the earth. I will admit to my own ignorance in this matter. There’s also the matter of drying, but I will freely admit that I have no idea how to do that. I really don’t. It might be as simple as just hanging up meat to dry, but if that instead has the effect of luring other predatory creatures this way, then it’ll just be a hindrance. I’ll consider the usage of bait for later.

As for fermenting…

I sniff the air and try to keep myself from gagging.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

-Yeah, no. Even if I knew the proper way to ferment deer, I wouldn’t do it. This body seems capable of handling half-rotten stuff, but if I get the process wrong and create some sort of pure poison, then I’m fucked.

That leaves me with only one conclusion. Unless I’m interested in eradicating all nearby life, I should focus on hunting and eating creatures around my own size. You know, to sustain biological diversity.

...Except I don’t really care about that. A better reason would be that handling half-rotten carcasses is a difficult and time-consuming task that leaves me open to attacks from other predators. To be fair, the bigger things I kill, the more exp I get. I definitely won’t hold off on killing anything and everything I come across just because their corpses will be a hassle to handle.

I’ll just try to keep it in mind. Maybe not bring the whole corpse with me after the hunt. Try to hunt far from my territory.

Yes, that would be my best course of action.

As for the deer…

My nose scrunches. I’ll eat what I can handle and then I’ll throw it into the river for the fish to munch. It’s a bit of a waste, but the smell is sure to start attracting scavengers soon. Since I’m not too well-read on Swedish critters and creatures, it could be anything.

Alright. Let’s get to it. Can’t just lie in bed all day feeling tired.

Though, really… My whole body feels stale. How long was I out, anyways? Considering the deer somehow smells even worse, it has to have been more than a few hours.

I stand up and try stretching my legs. Yeah, I feel stale, alright. That same old feeling when you’ve been sick for a couple of days and only now work up the strength to get out of bed. Internally groaning, I stretch my legs and my arms and my tail. I crack my neck. After a few minutes of such movements I return to feeling at least somewhat agile. I’ll tell you, back when I was a human, I was nowhere near this flexible. The last time I could move this much in one day was as a kid. Or maybe as a teenager. Once all that testosterone juice wore off I got real mellow real quick, it was seriously just-,

I stop in the doorway to the rest of the tunnel. I hear something. Some little gnawing sound, just ahead. Not above the hole, outside in the air. Inside the hole.

Instincts on edge, I poke my head out of my room and glance around. High above, the leaves and branches that had hidden my hole well are removed in places. Not to any larger degree, but enough to allow a smaller creature to pass through. I can’t tell by a simple glance exactly how big it is, but it is most likely bigger than myself. I can smell it.

Going by the sounds of gnawing and crunching, it is probably in the storage facility, happily going at the carcass of the deer. Just by the sounds I can’t tell for how long it has been doing it, but I guess I should be thankful that the smell is as bad as it is, since it likely masked my own scent from the invader.

...Only one way to deal with such an irritating creature. If I wanted to really make it suffer, I would simply climb out of the hole and cover it with a rock or even dirt. The creature inside would suffocate and I would be happy.

-But that isn’t direct.

Killing it like that wouldn’t feel right. And not because of honour or anything, no, I just want to make it suffer by my hands. It’s the difference between silently making your cheating lover suffer or confronting them on thanksgiving in front of your whole family. It’s not like it’s a bear or wolf or anything. Even if I stretch it a little, I imagine it can only be a little bigger than the fox. With the element of surprise on my side, I should be able to get a few good strikes in before it’s able to react at all. I hold all the cards here.

The only thing I can’t be sure of is-,

Lilltroll(E) Lv.12/30 Stage: Juvenile Health: 31/39

State: Sick(Lesser)

-Yeah. As he said, I’m not exactly at full strength. I feel fine, and if I just take it easy I’m sure the sickness will go away on its own. But my shit is being taken right now. Not later.

So, here we are. I creep towards the gnawing noise.

There, in the storage cavity, I watch as a large thing hunches beside the half-rotten carcass of the deer. It turns to me, its black eyes glistening in the light. Its fur probably had a different colour before this, but with its entire body almost fully drenched in black liquid, it seems like it's made of darkness.

Badger(E)

Stage: Elder Health: 52/56

State: Sick, Bloodfrenzy

...Is this supposed to be a joke?