Introduction

My name is William, but you can call me Wil. Now that I’ve introduced myself, I’m going to tell you a story. Some might call this an autobiography, or a journal, but I’m not arrogant enough to think you’d care to hear about all of that, nor am I smart enough to be able to tell you everything properly. I’m just a guy that’s reminiscing about all the crazy stuff I’ve gone through. Keeping that in mind, I’ll do my best to just stick to the juicy, interesting bits that I’ve seen and experienced in my life.

I just hope that someone, somewhere, will appreciate that I lived. I hope that for all my successes and mistakes, my good decisions, and my poor ones, you might care at all that some random schmuck was out there simply doing his best to muddle on through.

My story will begin later in my life, once I had already gone through many of the growing pains associated with becoming an adult, and beyond, sometime in my early thirties. Life was slow, dull, and held very little meaning to me. I was just living one day at a time, without purpose or much sense of self-worth.

But you don’t want to hear about that. That stuff is all boring, and most of you reading this have probably gone through your own versions of that life and don’t care to listen to a random loser’s recounting of what kind of 9-to-5’s he had.

No, my story starts when my life changed in such a way that I can only describe it as “fucking gigabonkers.” Those changes weren’t necessarily good, or bad. A lot of them didn’t even make any damn sense. But change is the way of the world, and all you can do is roll with the punches, praying that you come out the other side in one piece.

So, let me put on my talkin’ hat and we’ll kick this off with the very first memory I have of what I consider to be my “second life.”

One

It began one morning when I woke up in a field, without any knowledge of how I had gotten there. Now, you might think: Oh, he just went on a bender, had three or four too many drinks, and just blacked out in a field. We've all been there. Haha, yeah. NO! I've never been so blackout drunk in my life that I've lost memory of what I had done. Much to my regret and embarrassment. But, here I was, sitting in the middle of a field, staring at a gently rolling landscape that I didn't recognize

The night before, I had simply gone to bed normally, following my routine. Nothing special happened, there were no signs of anything out of the ordinary that I noticed. It was just another day of insignificance.

So.. What was with the idyllic landscape stretching out before me? I rarely, if ever, dreamed. I never had anything like a vivid dream, either. All my experiences were just dull, emotional nightmares that usually had me waking up in tears.

But this. Ah, how peaceful it seems, with the warm, lazy breeze making the trees and tall grass sway hypnotically. What a bright and sunny afternoon, not too hot, with the wind wrapping everything in a feeling of purity and freshness. A perfect ten out of ten day if I had ever seen one. It truly was serenity, a rare peace, something to never be taken for granted by a sane being.

Whilst admiring the scenery, cross-legged and with a dopey smile on my face, thoughts of where I was or how I had gotten there drifted further from my mind. Why waste this moment with logic and reason? I should just be thankful that I had such a convenient escape from my mind. I was just going to sit there and soak it in.

Just as I was settling into my tunnel vision and complete abandonment of the inconveniences of reality in general, I felt something cool nudge up against my knee. Ignorant bliss faded slightly as annoyance elbowed its way in, and I glanced down at the disturbance of my Zen moment.

And, there it was, the perpetrator. A small ball of.. something elastic(?) was stuck against the side of my knee, jiggling slightly when I shifted my body. It was transparent, and a light shade of blue, similar to the sky or the clear tropical oceans, I couldn't quite put my finger on the particular shade. While I was internally debating the merits of teals and turquoises and cyans, and which to assign to this little gelatinous mass, my knee started to itch slightly. 

Of course, it's stuck to my skin, any hygienic human being would start feeling gross just from that. A perfectly normal psychological reaction. And honestly, I should get this thing off of me, who knows what kind of commercial waste it is, some congealed blob of glue or something.

And with that, I poked my finger along my skin to get underneath it and pried it off in a quick flicking motion to minimize contact. It popped off and bounced a few feet away, burbled as it rolled to a stop, and started to settle back into a very.. blobby shape. It was only big enough to comfortably fit into the palm of my hand. Frowning as I scratched my knee, I noticed the skin was irritated and red now.

Great, some chemical crap in it, figures, I'll have to find somewhere to wash off. As I stood and stretched, I couldn't see any water around, but that didn't mean much, I'd just have to go find some dense trees and vegetation in one of the lowest elevation spots, probably at the bases of where these hills meet. There’s bound to a pond or a creek somewhere out here, there's plenty of greenery and enough trees to indicate an abundance of water.

As I was pursing my lips and trying to decide which direction to go, I felt a cool squish against the side of my foot. Looking down, sure enough, I had stepped on the blob of waste as I was turning around to get my bearings. I gave my foot a light shake and kick like I was trying to dislodge a dog turd. I had to lean down and pry it off with my finger again, humanity's own personal crowbar, which sent it rolling through the grass.

I frowned down at the little ball of pudge, contemplating my carelessness and becoming aware that I was only wearing a pair of boxers and a tank top, so I should try to make more of an effort to watch where I put my feet.

As I was then puzzled about exactly WHY I was only wearing boxers and a tank top, I noticed the little blue ball was moving. I blinked and bent at the waist to stare incredulously at this strange thing as it slowly rolled towards me.

On a whim, I walked around to the other side of it, circling some ten feet out and away to make sure I didn't disturb the ground it was resting on and stared at it from up the hill's slope. I didn't expect anything, but there was something about the way it was moving towards me that didn't seem quite.. natural. That, and the fact that it was clearly quite sticky yet no dirt or grass seemed to stick to it as it had headed towards me, made me instantly throw my previous assumption out of the window.

And, sure enough, after a couple of seconds of my arms crossed figure surely crushing down with an imposing presence uphill upon this goobly goop, scrutinizing it with the seriousness and hyper-focused attention to detail one might expect from someone microwaving something delicate for the first time ever. It started rolling up the hill, directly towards me.

Inhaling a long, hissing breath through my teeth, I let my head fall backward, closed my eyes, and exposed my face to the sky. Then, a massive gust of air was expelled straight upwards in a loud, bellowing voice. "Yep! It's a fucking dream!"

Raising my hands to shield my eyes from the sun, I squinted, gave everything another quick once over, and decided that heading downhill was my best bet. After trudging around for about ten minutes, I found what I was looking for. Easy peasy! Clear water bubbling out of some rocks a couple of dozen feet up the side of the hill, a steady little flow down into a small pond without noticeable scum around the edges, and a sandy bottom. Nature's filters are working hard out here! Still, probably not completely safe, no standing water ever is. But, if I had to gamble, it looked like a safer bet than most, and I should be thankful.

Just when I was patting myself on the back for a job well done, I froze in mid fist pump, only my eyes moving across to see three little blue blobs, just bobbing like little goobers on the water's surface, drifting aimlessly with the water's current. I frowned in disappointment and slumped down to sit at the water's edge. They didn't seem to be moving on their own, instead just being pushed around by the stream from the hill creating ripples on the surface. I pulled my legs up to my chest and put my chin on my knees, and stared at them floating there.

This is a dream, right? Because those are definitely slimes. Like capital S Slimes, the creature from fantasy stories and games. Little balls of slime that have a very minimal predatory consciousness, only aimlessly wandering and dissolving anything it can touch. Basically dumb as rocks, basically just an overgrown single-celled organism, and basically only as significant as a mosquito at the worst of times. Well, slimes were sort of an iffy area of knowledge for me. 

According to my limited and purely hypothetical given slimes don't actually exist in the real world knowledge, they're basically just colonies of cells or some other living substance, maybe even just a large single-cell organism, with some form of corrosion or acidic properties. They could only hunt in their own dumb, slow, adorable way of hoping things fall into their open mouth as it just goes about its business. Okay, the slime from before was definitely chasing me. Very poorly, sure, and I could crawl away faster than it could smoodge along, but it was still going in a direct line towards its food source.

And I'M the food source! Which means they're carnivorous, or at the very least omnivorous. It didn't exactly carve a path through the grass when it was moving, so it wasn't just eating organic matter willy-nilly. Okay, alright, okay, I'm getting way too carried away with this. Sure, it wanted to eat me. Sure it was STARTING to eat me, even though it only irritated my skin. But that means it was working. Holy shit, a slime was dissolving me and I didn't even realize it. 

SCARY! That's so damn scary! Even just a harmless little ball that'd never be able to catch me out, was actually managing to eat me right then and there solely because of my carelessness. As expected, Me, your dreams conjure up some fundamentally terrifying things, hidden behind sweet innocence, naivety, and cute packaging. What else am I going to run into that is going to be significantly cuter and deadlier than this nuisance of a slime? Where does it end, if this kind of thing is allowed? I'm weak to cute! I'm going to get eaten alive while I've got stars and hearts around my head! Wah, the world of my mind is scary, and mainly because I'm a scary person.

But, hey, this slime is shit, at least, right? Right..? Okay, I don't even know if I can kill it, and I'm kind of afraid to try, and also kind of don't want to because I don't like hurting things. It's the equivalent of a damn jellyfish, anyway, right? Just stay away from it and you're fine, it'll never harm you. Just be aware of it and mind your step, as you should be doing anyway. Everything is going to be fine.

I picked up a little stick and started poking at a slime that had drifted close to the water's edge near me, sniffling to myself as I both tried to terrify myself with my imagination and tried to console myself at the same time. I'm definitely going to have issues in this dream. It was going to turn into a long, dark nightmare. I could just tell. I could feel it.

I could also feel thirst. That was a bad sign. I was starting to get a little hungry. That was a worse sign. I had no haze whatsoever in my memory leading up to this point, I remembered each step and thought from when I woke up here, leading up to me sitting here and counting to one thousand with pokes against this slime who was clearly fighting the water current and trying to come after me, but I was just pushing it back into deeper water over and over again. It never gave up. And I could count straight to a thousand without skipping around. This dream had too much cohesion and lucidity.

I rubbed my face with my other hand and rested my cheek against it. I kept poking at the slime as my thoughts turned idle, wandered, and started analyzing stupid things around me. I thought about how the water was so clear, and the area around the pond itself was surprisingly neat, wondering if the slimes acted as filters and purifiers of a sort on their own. I was thinking about how deep a cleanse selectively permeable cell colonies could perform when I finally groaned and threw the stick into the water, putting my face in both hands.

The sun had started going down while I was musing and counting, and the light gradually receding in a solid line across me as the sun passed beyond the hill above me, had woken me from my stupor. I shivered slightly, no longer kept warm by direct sunlight. So many little things adding up that just made me feel like actually crying this time.

After a deep breath, I reached over, grabbed a small stone that looked a little flakey, and smacked it against another stone nearby. It shattered, leaving sharp edges on the pieces that were left, and I took one of those to the skin of my forearm and slid it a few inches along. I started bleeding, slow and steady. Pain burned along the line. I dropped the rock, grabbed my arm in my hand, and used my fingers to spread the cut open, rubbing my thumb once along it to wipe the blood away, and watched the blood seep out from the tissue underneath and fill the cut before dripping slowly to the ground. I rested my arms on my knees, lowered my head, and let out a shuddering breath.

I watched numbly as the slime I had been keeping at bay before, slid up to the patch of ground wet with my blood, and just sort of slowly glopped itself over it, just sitting there. A drop of blood fell from my finger and hit the top of the slime, the liquid bounced and formed a bead as if the surface of the slime was a nonstick frying pan. As it was sliding down the side of it, the surface changed and the blood was abruptly absorbed into the outer layer like it had hit a piece of sponge. It was then sucked deeper inside to the gelatinous interior and reminded me of adding a drop of food coloring to a glass of water. The blood dispersed, disappeared like it was mixing into the liquid, and then was gone.

I could see the blood from the dirt underneath it being absorbed up into it, and another drop of blood from my hand hit the top of the slime. My stomach grumbled as I watched this little blob feed on my life's blood like the predator it was, felt the pain of the cut in my arm recede but not disappear, and could clearly see that the bleeding had stopped and where I had already begun clotting. I hung my head, closed my eyes tight, and whispered hoarsely with my dry mouth.

"It's not a dream. Dammit.."

After managing to grab a couple of hours of sleep, I awoke shortly after sunrise feeling surprisingly reinvigorated and determined. ALRIGHT! Time to shake off this funk and get to surviving! Pretty gung ho indeed for someone like me. I never really did anything in my life. The threat of dying and having to fight for your own survival really motivates a person, huh?

As I'm not even sure that I'm still on Earth, counting on some kind of rescue or assistance, in general, would be ridiculous. While it might be true that I am still on Earth and it's just been altered in ways I don't understand, I don't really think I should operate under the assumption that anything here is what I expect it to be. It will just be safer that way, for sure.

I have very little knowledge of bushcraft, but I have gone camping a few times with my family, and I come from a long line of nature enthusiasts, to put it nicely. Years spent helping the folks go out into the woods for our firewood, hunting, field dressing, and all sorts of things. I never really did it as a hobby, so I didn't care to put much effort into it, but when the family needs help, you get dragged along and are expected to pull your weight. I only had a rudimentary knowledge of a lot of things like that, but at least I knew the general idea of how to get it done.

I can survive if I have to. I have the means, I just need the will. It's not going to be easy, but I have to do it.

Besides, I don't recognize that species of tree, and some of these plants look a little too fantastical. Since the sun had gone down the night prior, that lily-looking flower across the water had started glowing. And a blue frog-looking thing came down to get some water and had since gone up into a tree. Bioluminescence is not such a common thing, Nature. And what even is the point? Why does the plant glow? Why does the frog glow? What possible reason could they have for making themselves stand out and consequently easier prey?

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Forget it. Just shake it out and focus. Whether a lily wants to be its best, radiant self is not any of your concern right now. Your main focus is food and water, clothing, and shelter. Water is done, and having tasted a small palm full of water about an hour ago, I don't feel sick or anything, so it should probably be okay. I suppose I could eat that frog if I had to, but I'd really rather not, as brightly colored frogs are usually poisonous; and this frog was blasting out bright light like it wanted the entire world to know how fabulous it was. All through the night, it was like a 20-watt lightbulb just hanging out in the branches above me, but it croaks. As a strong believer in “better safe than sorry” I'm going to hard pass on amphibians in general, thanks.

Protein, meat, carnivore food. That was still my best bet. While I wasn't going to eat anything that was flashily daring me to, I was not willing to eat any plant without knowing for sure it wasn't a wacky form of hemlock or something. I'm not a botanist, but I have already seen things that I'm sure do not exist in any field survival book. Meat was surely much safer overall.

But that brought its own set of problems I had to address. For one, I had to cook the meat. Fire. I needed to channel my inner caveman first, and evolve from there into a higher being. Ugh, I never really paid attention to how exactly you're supposed to rub two sticks together to produce a flame. Which kind of sticks? Let's put that aside for now. I don't even have a potential food source yet, I'm getting ahead of myself and thinking too many steps down the line. First, food. Second, everything else.

I haven't seen any wildlife apart from the frog and, I guess if you count it, the slimes. I was at a watering hole and figured I hadn't been making enough of a ruckus to cause something as skittish as a deer or rabbit to not even show themselves. I arrived later in the afternoon, and have only stayed over one night, so that isn't much of a gauge on the traffic around here, but I still needed to be more proactive. If I spent days just waiting around for food to plop itself in front of me, I would be no better than those slimes. I would grow much weaker every day, and eventually not have the energy to kill the food in question.

That means I have to travel, to get a lay of the land. If I'm lucky I'll find some berry bushes or some such to buy me some time. Fruits are generally much safer to consume, as most of the time they're meant to be eaten to help spread the seeds within. Let's just do our best to be cautious, cross our fingers, and hope that this place isn't that much of a dick to be full of poisons.

While I was waiting to see if the pond water was going to give me the runs, I spent thirty minutes or so figuring out how to use some thick grass to tie one of those sharp-edged stones to the end of a sturdy stick I found. After a few practice swings and some more adjustments, I was sure it would hold up for a couple of hits. Probably. I'd just have to be damn sure to make my aim count. 

I filled my belly with water, slung my makeshift spear over my shoulder, and headed out in search of food. There was nothing that I wanted to put into my mouth near my little oasis, so I had to swing wide and head for the tree line that bordered these hilly grasslands. It took a couple of uneventful hours, and I had to pluck a couple of sharp pieces of grass out of the bottom of my bare feet, but I made it before the sun even peaked overhead.

It was a forest, alright, and dense enough looking to imply that it covered quite an area. The trees were big, six to eight feet across mostly, and resembled oak a bit, I think. The ones that kinda look like skinny broccoli are oak, right? There was almost no undergrowth to speak of, the ground was just dirt and with wide patches of moss, tree roots poking up now and then to break up the eerily flat and level forest floor.

Gazing deeper inside, I figured I could sprint at full speed through these woods and never trip. But I also figured if I lost sight of the grasslands at my back, I might not be able to find my way back. Everything looked the same, and it seemed to go on for miles. Getting lost in there might well be a death sentence, so I should be careful not to wander.

As I was turning to start walking along the tree line to maintain my bearings and keep searching, I thought I saw a quick flash of pale green in my peripheral vision. By the time I snapped around to stare where I thought it was, there was nothing moving. I had a clear view of that tree, even about two hundred feet out, and the entire surrounding area, but there was nothing. After a couple of minutes of blatant gawking, I decided it must be a leaf, even though I have yet to see a single leaf on the ground in those woods. Or a bird? Though come to think of it, I don't recall hearing a single bird call since I got here yesterday. 

Spooky. Too spooky. Let's stay away from these woods, they're a bit too Suspense/Thriller for my weak heart. Giving a couple of nervous glances up into the leafy branches about thirty feet up, praying I didn't start hearing clicking, I kept walking.

After what seemed like a couple of hours, I reached what seemed to be the corner edge of the field. And when I say corner edge, I mean it literally. It looked like when video games took different biomes and mashed them together. They bled into each other a little bit, with some outright overlap here and there, and it all seemed almost natural looking. But there was a clear, divisive point where one ended and one began. At this point I was standing directly on, to my back was the grassland I had woken up in, to my right was the spooky forest, and to my left was the beginning of the.. bushlands?

The Bushlands had grass much shorter than the Grasslands, but it was peppered liberally with bushes of all sizes, from the size of my torso to the size of a shipping container. I'd say at least half of them were nearly perfectly semi-spherical, and the other half was just a mish-mash of random senseless shapes.

Quite the distinct difference, leaving no other explanation than it just being a separate, self-contained environment. Walking about thirty feet into the Bushlands and I was already noticing a significant temperature drop, a couple of degrees every ten feet. It was like.. A massive warehouse, with heaters running on one side and air conditioners on the other. Walking from one side to the other still wouldn't be such a strange, awkward adjustment.

Another twenty feet and my ears popped. The biome was also pressurized! It was gradual and nearly seamless, sort of like an invisible wall system was keeping everything in balance, only keeping the atmosphere separated. Force fields? Barriers? Some other advanced weather manipulation or terraforming technology..? But, if it could also be naturally occurring.. 

This led to implications and theories that were waaay over my head, and I dropped into a squat, hugging my legs to my chest and burying my face in my knees.

Terrifying! I have absolutely no way to predict anything here! Nothing is making much sense, and if I let myself make assumptions it's going to get me killed. 

Why is this bush a dome the size of a small house? Why are there no bugs? Why does the air here feel so much drier than where I was standing fifty feet back? 

"Because magic, that's how." That whole damn fantasy setting trope?!

This is a completely blind experience, and I really hate not being able to rely on anything I know or have done before.

Just as I was wallowing in misery, rocking back and forth and groaning under my breath, I heard a snapping sound off to the side. Whipping my head towards it, I barely saw a blur of brown come dashing towards me from some dense patch of bushes.

Before I had time to even jump to my feet, a heavyweight slammed into my stomach, and a burning line of pain arced across the ribs of my left side. Thrown to the ground, gasping for breath, clutching my side, I could barely see that brown blur disappearing into another bush through my watering eyes.

Damnit! I’m so stupid, getting lost in my own world in the middle of an unfamiliar place! Struggling to my feet, only just beginning to be able to gulp down raspy breaths of air, I had to start stumbling back the way I had come. It was only a couple dozen yards to the biome line, to a wide-open space where I could have clear vision of what was attacking me.

Leaning on my makeshift spear, I hobbled as fast as my wounded ribs would let me, but it wasn’t very fast by any means. I had the other arm wrapped around myself, my hand pressed against my ribs, but I felt painful ripping and tearing as I pushed myself forward. I felt warm, sticky liquid spreading along my tank top, and after a few seconds, I could also feel it dripping between my fingers.

It was still hard to breathe, and it was getting harder with every step. There were sharp, stabbing pains every time I gasped, which made me think I’d probably had at least a cracked rib or two. Panic was welling up, and if I had any lung capacity to spare, I would be whimpering and crying like a scared little child. My heart was pounding in my ears so loudly that I could barely hear my own ragged breathing.

I had to get out of here, while I could still stay on my feet. All these bushes made it impossible to tell where that thing was, and if it were still chasing me I’d only get caught by surprise again. I had to get out of the Bushlands, back to the Grasslands. If I was lucky, it wouldn’t chase me beyond the line. If I wasn’t lucky.. I would at least have a better chance in the open. Hopefully.

I barely heard rustling behind me, my panting and heartbeat nearly drowning it out. Spinning, I instinctively pointed my spear towards the noise while I leaped to the side as hard as I could. My reflexes saved me, the blur swept through where I had just been standing.

My spear, which I had tried to put between me and it, was nearly torn out of my hand while I was airborne, and I heard some low squealing as I crashed heavily into a bush. The branches dug at me and scratched me all over, drawing blood in many places. My whole body was a criss-cross of stinging heat as I struggled to crawl out of the plant and get to my feet.

Hefting my spear, I started running towards the line once again. The tip of my spear had what seemed like some blood dripping down the shaft, so I must have at least grazed it. It might buy me a few extra seconds if that made it hesitate.

The boundary line came into view some twenty feet away. The sight fueled my inner survival instincts, and I made one last desperate push, tucking my head down and ignoring the screaming pain of my ribs as I made a mad dash for the open.

I could hear it, now. It was angry, I could tell. The squealing sound was now mostly faded into a predatory growl, like a pissed-off pig that also happened to bully wolves for their lunch money. It was now thundering through the underbrush, sounding like it was trampling and breaking everything in its path now that it was angry.

It was chasing me, and it didn’t want to just run me off anymore. It wanted me dead. If it was annoyed before at my trespassing, it was really pissed now that I’d hurt it. It probably wasn’t going to stop until I was ripped to pieces.

Just as I was reaching my goal, I noticed a low cluster of bushes directly ahead. It was something of a hedge, almost four feet tall, and a few dozen feet across. Too large to go around, not with the hell beast on my heels.

So when I got to it, I summoned all the unused potential from every athletic meet I ever lazed my way through in school, for this one single moment. I launched myself forward, trying to pick my legs up high enough to clear it and try to land on my feet on the other side..

..And failed miserably. My foot caught on a branch before I cleared the hedge, and I tumbled down across it, crashing through sharp branches and leaves before slamming into the earth just on the other side of it and rolling with the momentum.

It was a nasty spill, but my high levels of fear and adrenaline helped me recover from it. I came up on my knees, spinning to face the edge, lowering my spear at it as I shimmied backward. I had knocked the wind out of myself, and I could barely focus on the sound rampaging towards me. I couldn’t see it coming, but I could hear it getting closer. I crouched low on my knees, planted the butt of my spear into the dirt, and braced myself.

An eternally long handful of seconds crept by, and then the bushes in front of me erupted, showering me in debris as a large brown shape soared through the air right towards me.

It looked kind of like a warthog, but bigger, burlier, and with notably more tusks and horns sticking out of its muscular body. It looked mean and very capable of killing the crap out of me in short order.

At least, until it saw that I was down underneath it, curled around my shitty little spear that was pointed straight up at it. For a split second, as it was coming down towards me from its leap, I thought it looked surprised. But that thought was gone in a single beat of my frantic heart.

The boar’s leap carried it perfectly down onto my spear, which plunged deep into its flesh at the base of its neck. The length of wood snapped in my hands, and the boar’s body weight fell on top of me in a painful impact that nearly knocked the air out of my lungs again.

It smashed me to the ground, bouncing off of me and to the side, sending me sprawling along with it. For another few long seconds, neither of us moved or made noise, the both of us dazed and in shock. Then I heard it start thrashing and squealing like a pig again.

I picked myself up out of the dirt, getting to my hands and knees, and looked at the boar trying to get to its feet, falling repeatedly as if it couldn’t put strength into its legs. It just sort of rolled around and spasmed randomly. The spear must have hit something vital, the boar would surely die eventually without any more effort from me.

At least, that’s what I thought at first until it noticed me staring at it. The low, guttural growls started up again between the squealing, and it spun on the ground to face me. It planted its hind legs, bracing itself, and with visible effort, it rose up on its front legs until it was standing again. It was shaking, but it was standing, and it was glaring murder at me.

Shaken, I scrambled in the dirt around me until I found the broken haft, and pointed the jagged edge of wood at the beast. It took one shuddering step towards me, and then another. It wasn’t going to just lay down and die, it was going to come at me until it couldn’t.

I scooted back in preparation to run again and felt a jarring pain run up from my leg. I must have gotten it twisted underneath me when the boar landed on top of me. It felt like I was hurt pretty badly, myself.

Shit. This thing had a chunk of wood sticking out of its neck, but the blood was dripping too slowly to give me any hope of it bleeding out soon, and I couldn’t run. It even picked up a little speed when it noticed I wasn’t moving well. I didn’t know if I could walk, let alone run, and this boar looked damned determined to chase me down.

As it lumbered towards me, I came to the conclusion that there was no way I was avoiding this. It was a fight to the death now. Either I was going to finish it, or it was going to finish me. If I didn’t go at this piggy with the intent to kill, I was committing suicide. I had to kill it. Period.

I was filled with a focus and drive I had rarely experienced in my life, fueled by a long-dormant survival instinct and juiced up on a lovely cocktail of brain chemicals that made me feel like my body was electrified and on fire. My hair was standing on end, I had goosebumps, and I stared unblinkingly at my foe while air hissed in and out of my clenched teeth. I nearly started snarling back at the pig.

We both edged closer to each other, a mixture of walking and crawling, our wounded bodies dragging themselves towards this fight for survival.

We were so close now I could reach out and almost touch it. One more step, into range.. And that was the signal. We both lunged forward. I jabbed my sharp stick forward, trying to aim for its eye. It swung its head, trying to shred me with its tusks and horns.

My stick glanced off the side of its face because of its swinging head, I only managed to gouge some of its skin. Its horns didn’t gouge into me because it wasn’t expecting me to leap at it. The side of its head slammed into my gut, but thankfully I was behind most of its sharp weapons.

I curled an arm down around its neck and tightened my grip with everything I had as it began whipping itself around to dislodge me. I kept trying to stab down at it, only succeeding in scratching it over and over as its whole body thrashed. It cut me over and over with some boney bits sticking out of its leg joints, and some that it had running down its spine, but I hung on for dear life.

We scrambled in the dirt, rolling over each other once or twice. It managed to kick me twice, but never hard enough to knock me loose. I was in too tight, it couldn’t find any purchase to get in a good blow. All the while I was stabbing at its face with my broken branch, so many times that I lost count. The blood from us both spattered all around us as we strained to end each other’s life.

At last, one of my frantic jabs finally caught it in the eye. It screamed so loud and high-pitched that I thought my eardrums would burst. But it stopped trying to fight me off for a second as it reeled in the pain. The stick had only gone a few inches into its eye, not enough to be fatal apparently, and its swinging head had wrenched it out of my hand.

I took the chance to grab its horns in my hands and try to wrestle it to the ground. I knew that if I could get its feet out from under it, I would probably get a bigger advantage. I twisted and pushed, leaning my body weight down on its neck and head, trying to roll it down into the dirt and at least onto its side.

The stick in its eye must have disoriented it more than I thought because it went down harder than I hoped. With my whole weight on it, jerking it down sharply, it slammed into the dirt with a good deal of force. There was a crunching, cracking sound, and I felt something sharp jab against my chest up through the pig’s skin.

The boar went limp, and it only struggled weakly underneath me, straining even to breathe. I lifted myself off the painful sharp point and stared down at it with my hands still firmly gripped in its horns. The weight of both of our bodies had fallen nearly perfectly onto the broken spear stuck inside it and had jammed it up through its body the rest of the way until it had stuck out a half-inch from its back and pricked me.

I reached up and grabbed the stick lodged in its eye socket, and with one last painful, groaning spurt of strength, pushed it down with my weight to sink into the boar’s brain. It spasmed twice more, then stopped moving entirely.

I slumped across the corpse, panting, limp, in agony. I could only make pitiful little whimpering noises as I tried to bring myself back to my senses. I slid down off of it, propped myself against it, and half sat up as I stared down at the beast that had nearly killed me.

When a man is faced with his first life or death crisis, it’s not uncommon for him to cry. There aren’t many outlets for that kind of raging insanity of emotions as you struggle just to stay alive. I was too exhausted to yell, I was in too much pain to celebrate, and I was too dumbfounded by the entire experience to gather my thoughts.

For me, someone who had lived a relatively sheltered and boring life in modern society, this whole affair was probably pretty traumatizing. I was already somewhat of an emotional wreck as it were, and going through this felt like it was pushing my sanity to its limits.

So, naturally, I just hung my head and wept silently.

I was just thankful that I was alive. For now.