Chương 2: Complaints to HR

The first hour of his new life, Finn decided, was essentially a very aggressive onboarding process with no HR department and a nonrefundable enrollment fee. Every action had a cost. He understood this now in the bone-deep way that only becomes clear when the costs are immediate and physical and the system tracking them has absolutely no interest in softening the feedback. Move too fast through the underbrush — Fatigue ticks. Stand still too long — Exposure ticks.

Breathe, exist, occupy space in this blood-red forest — Hunger and Thirst tick, reliable as a billing cycle, indifferent as a utility company. He was trying to figure out the exchange rate. What he spent versus what he got back. It was the kind of problem his brain was actually built for, which was the only reason he wasn't curled in a ball under a thorn-tree freaking out about the fact that he'd been ripped out of a Tuesday afternoon and deposited into what appeared to be a divine arena designed for his suffering.

Data. Collect data. Work the problem. He started with the plants. The logic was sound — he was hungry, the forest had vegetation, some of that vegetation was almost certainly edible. He'd watched enough survival documentaries to know that people ate things from forests. The documentaries had, it turned out, been operating under the assumption that you had some baseline knowledge of what you were looking at. Finn had baseline knowledge of avocados and the general shape of a strawberry. This was not optimally useful.

He grabbed the first plant that looked promising — broad leaves, dark green shading toward purple, low to the ground. He held it up. The Nexus tagged it immediately. 【Specimen Identified 】 Unknown Specimen Edibility: Unconfirmed Toxicity: Unconfirmed Suggested action: Further analysis required. Do not eat without confirmation. The Watchers observe your foraging instincts. Charitably. He set it down and grabbed the next one.

Pale stalks, slightly waxy, small clustered leaves that reminded him vaguely of something his mother had grown in a pot on the back porch in Modesto. The Nexus was waiting for him. 【Specimen Identified 】 Unknown Specimen Edibility: Unconfirmed Toxicity: Unconfirmed See previous note.

"The system," he said, crouching to examine a third plant with the resigned focus of a man reviewing a spreadsheet that kept returning the same wrong value,"tagged every plant I tried to eat as Unknown Specimen, which is its polite way of saying 'probably poison.' I appreciate the honesty. I do not appreciate being hungry." The third plant was small, round-leafed, and bore clusters of dark berries that caught the crimson light like tiny garnets.

His stomach made a noise that was, in his professional opinion, a vote for eating them. He held one up. 【Specimen Identified 】 Bloodthorn Berry — Caution: Toxicity Suspected Edibility: NOT RECOMMENDED Toxicity: Moderate (gastrointestinal distress, Hunger drain acceleration) Note: Consumption during early survival phase constitutes a poor strategic choice. The Watchers would find the results entertaining. This is not an endorsement.

He put the berry down with the gentleness of a man who had absolutely been considering eating it. The fourth specimen he tried was a strip of bark from one of the iron-thorn trees — he'd scraped it off experimentally with his thumbnail, which had accomplished nothing except confirming that the tree had no interest in being damaged. The Nexus dismissed it without ceremony. 【Specimen Identified 】 Ironwood Bark — Non-consumable Edibility: No This is bark. The Watchers appreciate your thoroughness.

The bar for 'thorough' has been set. By the time he'd worked through seven specimens — two more Unknown, one confirmed inedible fungus, one thing that the Nexus categorized as Aether-Touched Moss (Effects Unknown — Inadvisable) — his hands were scratched, his Hunger had ticked to 81%, and the notification he'd been accumulating arrived. 【Training Insight 】 You have examined 7 plant specimens under active survival pressure. Intellect +0. 1 │ Perception +0. 1 Foraging detection rate improved marginally.

The Watchers note your fumbling. They find it acceptable entertainment. Two tenths of a stat point. For forty minutes of increasingly frustrated plant-grabbing. He stared at the numbers. Then he filed them under this is how it works here and moved on, because the alternative was to have feelings about it, and he didn't have the caloric reserves for feelings yet.

The stream found him before he found it — or rather, he heard it, followed the sound east through a gap in the thorn-trees, and emerged onto a muddy bank where the water ran clear over dark stones. Cold, moving, about knee-deep at the center. He crouched at the edge and would have called it a win except for the thing approximately fifteen feet upstream. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. He wasn't sure what it was.

Had been something, once — four-legged, roughly dog-sized, now thoroughly deceased and in the early stages of returning to the forest in ways that involved smell. It was close enough that the stream ran past it before it ran to him. The Nexus offered no identification, which meant either it didn't know or it had decided the relevant information was self-evident. His Thirst meter sat at 87%. Ticking. He looked at the stream. He looked at the dead thing. He looked at the stream again.

He couldn't clearly see if there was stream on the other side of the dead thing.

"I've made worse decisions at 2 a. m. with access to the entire internet," he told himself, and drank. The water was cold and tasted like copper and minerals and, faintly, like a choice he was going to regret. The Nexus waited until he'd drunk enough to matter before it weighed in.

【Hydration Restored 】 Thirst: 87% → 59% *Source quality: Compromised (downstream contamination detected) Sickness Debuff Applied: Mild Nausea — Hunger drain rate +15% for 2 hours — Minor Fatigue accumulation increased Next time, upstream. The Watchers did not say anything. Their silence is its own comment. His stomach registered its opinion of this development approximately four minutes later.

Not catastrophic — nothing that required action — just a persistent low-grade wrongness that settled in and made itself comfortable alongside the hunger and the cold. He crouched at the streambank and waited for it to either worsen or stabilize, and when it stabilized he accepted it as the new baseline and got back to work." Lesson learned, next time go check." The stick project took forty minutes. He'd been holding the stick— the one he'd picked up when the wolf howled, arm-length, decent weight.

He needed a weapon, cavemen could make weapons, Finn decided he could as well. He'd found a flat grey stone with a rough edge near the streambank, not flint but close enough to something useful that he was willing to try. The technique was simple in theory: drag the stick across the rough edge at an angle, repeatedly, until it was sharp.

The theory survived contact with reality. The practice was forty minutes of scraping, repositioning, scraping again, shaving off the wrong amount in the wrong direction, starting over on a slightly different angle. His arm ached by the twenty-minute mark. His right hand had a new raw patch where the stone edge caught it twice. He kept going, because the alternative was having no point on his stick, and he had already done that.

When it was done — genuinely, actually done, tapered to something that would penetrate rather than just annoy — he held it up. The Nexus arrived with the quiet dignity of a certification office stamping a form. 【Crafting Success 】 Crude Pointed Stick (Common) Damage: 3 (piercing) Durability: 15/15 (degrades with use) It is a stick. It has a point. These are real things. The Watchers withhold judgment. For now.

"I made a stick," he said. His voice came out steadier than he expected.

"It has a point. I am an apex predator armed with a stick with a point. The wolves are not worried." He stood, tested the weight, and decided not to think about the fact that he really didn't know how to use a pointed stick as a weapon. The theory was solid, pointed end towards enemy. Jab. Repeat. But he was really hoping that he wasn't going to have to test this theory. The light changed. He didn't notice it gradually.

One moment the crimson canopy was filtering its usual dim-dusk light and then it was doing it with distinctly more commitment to the dusk part of that description, shadows deepening between the thorn-trees, the temperature dropping another degree or two in the space of what felt like minutes. His Exposure meter agreed: 61% and no longer drifting but dropping with purpose. He checked his other meters out of habit.

Hunger: 71%, and the color of the number had shifted — still white, but with the faint suggestion that it was considering going yellow. Thirst at 59%, the only one he'd made any progress on, and that progress came with the nausea debuff still running its clock. Fatigue at 65%. He had not eaten. This was the central fact of the day. He had drunk contaminated water, scraped a stick into a point, catalogued seven inedible plants, and learned 0. 2 stat points worth of information.

The forest had cost him a full day and given him back marginally better odds of noticing the thing that would eventually kill him. From somewhere northwest — the same northwest as before, he heard a howl. Then a second, overlapping. Then a third. Too many howls. He moved. The fallen log was thirty meters from the stream, massive, long-dead, its bark stripped away by something larger than him and its underside raised just enough by the root system to create a gap.

He found it more by smell than sight — rot and old damp wood — and crouched to examine it with the hand-torch of his Nexus HUD light, which he'd discovered he could project in a narrow beam at the cost of it feeling faintly invasive. The gap was tight. It smelled like a place that other things had sheltered in before him and hadn't smelled great then either. There were no current occupants, which was the only metric that mattered. He crawled in.

The fit was exactly as bad as advertised — shoulders almost too wide, one elbow in something soft he chose not to identify, face close enough to the log's underside that the wood grain was the last thing he'd see if anything collapsed. He angled the Crude Pointed Stick along his body where he could grab it without requiring a full range of motion he didn't have. Outside, darkness fell in stages, the forest going from dim to dimmer to actually dark.

The howls moved around each other in the northwest, conversational, unhurried. They were not coming closer. They were also not going away. Hunger at 67%. The number glowed in his vision with a soft, neutral patience that was somehow worse than urgency. He lay in the damp dark and ran the day's data in his head the way he'd once run end-of-quarter reports — not because it made him feel better but because the analysis was all he had. He knew seven plants he couldn't eat. He knew the stream.

He knew his stick worked, hopefully. He knew he needed fire and food and better shelter, in that order or in parallel, starting tomorrow. Tomorrow. He was going to have to do better tomorrow.