I drew my pistol, I fucking hated snooty animals. Having a balls-out deathmatch was one thing, but being a prick while that was going on was a whole other thing.

I fired at the momma-deer and she pranced to the side. Complete miss.

What?

I fired again and again, scoring a hit.

Kid-deer was here and clocked me in the side with its baby-horns, hard. I dropped the baseball bat on reflex and managed to catch mama’s searching teeth on my shield.

I blasted Will at Bambi and he was caught off guard at his weight unexpectedly shifting he was sent off and to the ground. I pulled back my shield to bash mama’s head but she turned and it turned into a contest between an improvised bash vs. a full power deer-buck-kick. My shield somehow didn’t dent as a gong went off and my arm went almost completely numb. I guess ‘This is My Shield’ reinforced the cheap thing. My pistol slid from my senseless fingers and to the ground.

I ripped the kukri-hatchet from its holster on my waist and lunged at Bambi’s mother, herself still recovering from the blocked kick and I scored a deep gouge on her neck.

“Agh fuck!” As I was brutalizing his mother, Bambi’s teeth closed onto my trap muscle and he ripped a chunk of flesh from it.

I blasted another chunk of Will from my back to drive him away and heard him skitter. Mom distanced herself and I took the moment to create some space.

I snapped dull fingers on the second try and sent my heal from stabbing Ron last night to work healing my neck-shoulder area. Apparently, there was some extra healing left-over because the numbness of my shield arm faded as well.

Bambi dropped his head and rutted his back legs. It looked… deliberate.

My shield raised and I willed myself forward in a Rush as I countercharged him. The off-balance feeling of your brain and feet receiving different inputs threw me a bit off balance as I closed the distance faster than my mind could logically accept. I only made it a few extended steps right before Bambi did the same fucking thing in front of me with some sort of dash-attack that left us both unprepared for the impact and sent us sprawling. I landed better than he did.

Fuck. This. I reached for my shotgun in my backpack, it wasn’t there. I found it next to me instead and took it in hand.

Boom. Boom.

Bambi’s mom got two in the chest and face. Dropped.

“Mother can’t be with you anymore.”

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes to hide the grimace. Now the ‘manison-eating’ deer was trying to tug on heartstrings. That might have worked about a hundred animals ago.

“Life is all about perspective, kid.”

My perspective being that I was going to murder the shit outta Bambi and his entire bloodline.

The stag disengaged from Ron before shouting to the trembling young deer,

A high-pitched keening scream came from Bambi and made me wince. He… was doing something bad. Evolving? I regripped my blade and hurled it at him. Whatever the abomination my blade-hatchet-kukri counted as I guess it was close enough to a ‘throwing axe’ as it spun end over end and landed with a deep thump into the juvenile deer’s chest.

A, almost literally, cutting wind came out from Bambi and pushed me lower to the ground and I barely managed to not fall over, Bulwark coming in handy to provide the last bit of necessary stabilization.

I rushed to reload the shotgun as Bambi started going super-saiyan/shounen-protag on me. Absolute bullshit. He grew in bulging, warping twists, muscles and bones jutted at odd, unnatural angles that made you wince in pain from just watching it. Dark coils of mist and a sickening turquoise leaked from his eyes as his horns grew from nubs to warped, twisted things that dripped darkness. A new hierarchy of hate populated my mind.

1. Deer

2. Llama

3. Cats

4. Foxes

The worst. If you feel different, fight me. Forget that, fight them then come back and tell me how right I am.

I looked at Ron, he was currently in the middle of being gored, and goring the buck in turn as they locked against each other. He was struggling to get his pitchfork to the heart but looked to be getting bodied pretty bad for his effort.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Sharp dark wisps formed on the wind, I could barely make them out as the dim light faded further from our surroundings. Was it getting that much later? One of them sliced toward me and I instinctively flinched back. The black wind, whatever it was, sliced a clean, shallow cut down the length of my shotgun barrel and continued to slice deep into my tricep before flying past.

I yelped before pushing Dark to my eyes and searched. Whatever those were, I couldn’t take one of those in any critical part of me. The barely visible shadows of wind became much more clear as my Evil Eye effect managed to stagger Bambi just enough.

Reloaded, I clicked my shotgun closed. Time to hunt Bambi.

The split pause ended as the wind cut toward me, fast. I brought my shotgun up. He fucking disappeared.

Having watched DBZ as a child and having been fairly experienced in typical shounen tropes, I flung myself to the side and barely managed being gored by whatever-the-hell was going on with this deer. Dark antlers flashed past me and he disappeared again. I spun and dodged the occasional black-wind blade coming in from oblique angles.

My eyes fell on Ron, now being topped by the buck as it drove its antlers deeper and deeper into him. Did killing the mom power them both up? Ron had seemed somewhat resistant to my shotgun before, so I fired off both rounds at Ron and the buck, centering my shots on the daddy deer, then threw it to the side. Before I could draw my sword I felt… something.

I had felt it before. I’d never forget it. Death.

I blasted out weak spurts of Will around me as fast, as weak, and as far as I could and felt one of the feelers hit something. My Will pushed up against a competing Will. In that direction I pumped Fortitude into a blast of Will. It hit home to interrupt whatever silent-death-wind-charge Bambi had been in the middle of doing and knocked him out of it as he suddenly appeared in a twitching heap across the ground.

Even though my Will had blasted him out of whatever technique he had been doing, he was still going incredibly fast and considering that he had been in the middle of charging at me and hadn’t been that far away meant that a skittering ball of Bambi crumpled into me and sent us into a twisting slamming heap. I scrambled free and only took a semi-brutal antler slice across the outside of my thigh.

I drew my sword and moved to stab the shit out of the forest critter, but he scrambled up and disappeared into another blur. I kept cycling bursts of Will into random directions as I felt my Fortitude drop in what was a tense and exhausting effort and growing more so by the moment. I was spending too much Will.

I collapsed Bambi’s assault a second time but I couldn’t get a hit on him, he was traveling too fast and I didn’t want to take my chances tumbling with those horns again. I realized how lucky I was to have avoided instant death the first time. I didn’t feel lucky, brave, or tough enough to risk tangling with Bambi a second time.

“What the fuck happened to Bambi?”

I risked turning my head a fraction of a degree, Ron was up. He looked like shit and had a bad gut wound, but he was up. He brought his pitchfork upright then stabbed the base of it a foot into the ground. He snapped both fingers then grabbed the handle in front of him. A thin layer of sandy dirt crawled up his feet and swept over his wounds. It turned darker as the new grit managed to mostly staunch his bleeding. More sandy dirt crawled up and around his pitchfork, turning it into a hammer with pointy tips poking out of the end of it as hardened layers of dirt formed over the base of the prongs.

Damn, that was pretty cool.

“That’s pretty slick.”

Ron grinned, “We aren’t all so lucky to have a shotgun.”

“You shoulda seen what I had to do to get it.” I distractingly motioned toward my shirt as my eyes and Will continued to scan my surroundings.

His eyebrows twisted in some confusion.

A few cutters appeared that I easily dodged, then Bambi appeared a couple dozen feet away and was panting hard. I stopped cycling waves of Will as all three of us stood there sucking in humid air as we tried to catch our breath and regenerate enough to continue the fight. His little dash attack of death had to be Fortitude intensive.

I want to know how he powered-up so much. What I already knew was that Fortitude regeneration is literally controlled by your commitment, at least to a degree. After all, the Fortitude stat is your ‘will to live’, so it was obvious that your ‘will to live’ would affect your Fortitude stat in turn. Well, at least now it was obvious.

Long way of saying that killing his mother and father must have provided a monumental boost. After all, if it was your magic-tank and your ‘Will to live’, then seeing your loving, man-eating parents cut down by your presumed-prey and Bambi still managing to maintain his fortitude to kill his enemies had to have given him some Feats.

Not to mention whatever dark-powerup he stacked with that. I mean, the massive, dripping-shadow antlers were kind of a dead giveaway, so it wasn’t a stretch to imagine some sort of nemesis trade happening as well. You kill someone’s parents in front of them and they’re so quick to trade their soul away for some revenge power. Can’t people just sit and think for a second before making a trade with a source of evil? I mean, really. Very annoying.

A thought stuck out, especially so in the strange lull we were all resting in, how a regenerating force multiplier like Will could change the flow of a fight. I had been in a few fights before the apocalypse and it was mostly trying to punch and grapple the other person until it was inevitably broken up, at least from my own experience. That and making sure the other person didn’t have an entire group of friends willing to help your face make a personal acquaintance with the concrete.

Now? Besides the guns and melee weapons, Fortitude-management was a real factor. I thought I was some hardened apocalypse ‘3L1T3’, but reality was that we were all newbs. During a fight, proper Fortitude management is likely to be a deciding factor going forward. A good lesson to learn sooner rather than later.

“Hey, did you hear me? What the hell did you do to Bambi?”

“I don’t know, man. I just killed his mom and this shit happened- Watch out for the black wind!” I tried to shove him and couldn’t so I just dodged myself. It barely cut into him, I was a bit jealous as that stuff treated my skin like warm butter.

“Watch it, he’s fast.”

“You killed Bambi’s mom? His mother? Bro.”

“I know! I know, next time I’ll kill Bambi first.”

We glanced at each other and chuckled darkly for a shared moment.

Bambi disappeared.