The first thing he noticed was the smell of peat, carried on the wind. The air felt cool against his skin and he could hear rustling, moving in concert with the breeze on his skin.

He opened his eyes and took in his surroundings. It was usually safe to close your eyes, entering a round for the first time, and it helped with the motion sickness that watching the world blur sometimes caused. You usually weren’t in any immediate danger, for a few seconds, at least.

He was standing in a pine forest, with dense trees and brush in every direction. He couldn't puzzle out the time of day, as the trees were so tall and dense it kept him from determining the exact position of the sun. The light filtering through the trees implied either morning or evening, though.

Was this the same as last time? It had been so long ago that the memories of it were covered in cobwebs, and colored with fear and panic. Since his mind stat hadn’t yet been high enough to give him perfect recall, he was stuck trying to puzzle it out from the emotions it had caused.

It had been a forest, yes, but had it been this forest? The first time around it had been oppressive, leaving him constantly looking over his shoulder as he felt eyes on his back.

Now it just felt… calm.

[Prologue: Round One]

[Welcome to the Forest of Life]

[Primary Objective: Survive at least 2 weeks]

[Secondary Objectives:

-Slay 40 Monsters

-Earn a Skill

-Defeat the Area Boss]

[Rewards will be allocated based on overall performance and completion of the objectives]

Simple enough.

Ari took his quarterstaff in hand, tested the wind, and started walking upwind.

***********

As the hours passed, Ari found himself walking uphill. He had passed a small stream a while ago and taken the chance to fill up his canteen, but decided against trying to follow it to the source.

There was no civilization to be found here.

He continued his trek until he saw the sun cresting over the tops of the trees, and the air around him began to warm as the light shined down.

Noon, then.

He took the chance to sit down on a nearby stump and rest, lamenting his lack of conditioning for distance walking. Would it have killed him to step on a treadmill every once in a while in the old world? Everything below his waist ached, and he was developing blisters on his hand where he held the staff, wearing the wood grain smooth under his grip.

He needed to find some sort of shelter. Last time he remembered having stumbled upon a cave, half starved and delirious with sleep deprivation, but the chances of finding it again without any landmarks was slim. The only thing he could do in this endless forest was to keep walking until he found something.

Sitting with his legs crossed and arms in his lap, he delved inward to take stock of his mana. Ari had been circulating it as he walked in a form of active mediation, but it felt like trying to dig a hole underwater.

To his inner sight, his body was an absolute dump.

Where his mana channels were even open at all, they were so constricted with buildup and seeded with blockages it was a miracle he could budge it. The rest of his body was completely dark to his sight, meaning no mana was reaching it at all, and the mana channels leading towards the surface of his skin were completely encrusted, meaning that he would have to get… creative in order to use it externally. No spells for him, at least not yet.

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That… could be a problem.

Why was it different this time? Why was he so…

His eyes snapped open. The forest had gone silent.

He stood agonizingly slowly, picking up his staff in one hand and keeping his eyes trained on the ground.

Everything was silent for one second, then two, then five. Then three forms came crashing out of the forest in a blur of claw and scale.

In one smooth motion, Ari dropped into a crouch and let one end of the staff fall to the ground, bracing it between the rock that had served as his seat and the forest floor. He levelled it like a boar spear, pointing directly south. Downwind.

Less than a second later, a bestial form crunched into the end of the staff.

Examining his foe, it appeared to be some sort of wolf-lizard hybrid, scaled with a long snout and sharp fangs and claws, about as tall as his waist. Its sternum was crushed, with what looked to be several broken ribs, and it was writhing on the ground in pain. Its two compatriots were momentarily frozen, stunned by their oblivious prey fighting back, but it wouldn't stay that way for long.

Ari wasted no time in gathering up his staff with both hands, and threw all his weight and momentum into one stabbing blow that crushed the injured creature's windpipe. The other two creatures began to snarl and circle him around the edge of the clearing.

“Every time. Every time, it’s the same”. Ari said in a low, steady cadence. Talking during fights was a habit that he had gotten into at some point a decade or so into the last run, and he found that it helped project a level of confidence which gave creatures above a certain threshold of intelligence pause. It was a small advantage, but as a person who specialized in healing over fighting, he needed to stack the deck every possible way.

“You forest carnivores either hunt by smell or hearing, and I wasn't making any noise. And once you have my scent, you always, always, attack from downwind.”

Ari slowly turned in a circle with the monsters, taking care to keep both of them in his eyeline. He took a deep breath in, then his hands tightened around the wood of staff in self inflicted pain as he forced mana into his eyes for a crude [Identify].

[Forest Stalker]

[Threat Level: Low]

The nameplates snapped into view above their heads, and information flooded into Ari’s mind. The creature’s weak points came first, then their weapons, and he got as far as their fighting tactics before his mana rebelled, snapping back into its stagnant state and giving Ari a splitting headache. All this took less than a second.

The creatures were snarling a bit softer now, circling a bit farther away from him, closer to the treeline.

“Yeah, nasty, isn’t it? Feels like you’re being watched?” Ari shuddered in sympathy for the stalkers. “Took me months to get used to it, and years to be able to block it. Trust me, I get it. But you unfortunately won’t get the chance.” He trusted the information [Identify] had given him, and slowly turned his back to the smaller of the stalkers.

They were dumb enough to fall for the same trick twice.

A snapping snarling form came rushing towards his back as Ari dropped his staff, and rolled backwards. As the Stalker’s momentum carried it over Ari’s crouched form, placing it between his prey and his packmate, Ari drew his dagger from his sheath and stabbed up with it into the creature's soft underbelly. It got just deep enough to puncture a lung, but Ari wasn’t strong enough to drive it in any further.

The creature keened as Ari grabbed for his staff and spun from a crouched position, whipping it into the Stalker’s back leg and heard a crunch. He winced as he felt warm liquid dripping down his arm, and resolved not to look down at his shoulder, where a stinging sensation was rapidly making clear that the beast had managed to tag him with its claws. There would be time to worry about that when he wasn’t in active combat.

The third Stalker leapt over its hobbled and dying brother towards Ari, and he barely managed to get his staff in the way in time. What followed was a few seconds, an eternity in a battle, of the Stalker lunging and Ari barely managing to deflect it with staff blows and dodge by fractions of an inch. But as the battle progressed, the margin of Ari’s dodges got wider and wider, and his blows grew sharper and sharper until the creature collapsed, too bruised and battered to continue to stand.

Ari almost collapsed too, but caught himself, quickly retrieving his dagger from the second creatures belly, and slit the throat of all three monsters, only getting halfheartedly snapped at by the wounded creatures in the process.

He cleaned the blood off his weapons on the nearby foliage, and examined his shoulder. The scratches were long, but not particularly deep. They had almost stopped bleeding already. He resolved to bandage himself at the next available source of running water, but he needed to move.

His scent would be all over the clearing, but there was nothing for it. He would just have to keep moving and find a defensible position before anything could track him down.

He left the clearing with a little more urgency in his step than he had come in with.