Chương 3: Book 1: Chapter 2 - Borrowed Steel [Part 2]

Shimon slowly raised his head. Between two trunks, something pale moved. He froze so completely that even his breathing seemed to stop. The shape was low to the ground, but not small. Too narrow for a boar. Too angular for a deer. He caught only pieces of it through the brush: a pale flank, or maybe hide; a joint bending the wrong way; the gleam of something wet; a head that dipped and vanished before his eyes could settle on it. Boar, he thought. It was a boar. It had to be a boar. Boars were terrifying enough.

People forgot that because modern civilization had successfully put pigs between buns that the original animal was quite fierce indeed. A wild boar could open up a man's stomach like a zipper. That was bad, but bad was fine and could be dealt with, a part of his mind analyzed. The problem was that the creature had scanned the forest with reptilian eyes. Another sound answered it from deeper in the woods. This one was not a grunt. It was not a growl.

It was a thin, rising whine that broke halfway through into a chittering rattle, as if a fox, a cicada, and a broken printer were having a party. Shimon's skin crawled. Bear, he tried to suggest to himself and failing miserably. The brush shifted again. Three shapes this time, or one shape moving too quickly between the trees. His biochip tried to help. Peripheral attention sharpened. Motion sorted itself into fragments filled with calculations of angles, distance, and threat lines.

However, none of that told him what he was seeing and could answer his fears. The spear trembled in his hands before his chip, borrowing his senses, warned him of something. Warning: Unidentified Hostile Presence Detected"No, damnit. No…" Shimon breathed, schooling himself to some semblance of non-panic. That was it. No helpful taxonomy. No level. No little red outline hovering politely over the bushes to show him where to point the spear. Just "Unidentified Hostile Presence," thank you very much.

He backed away, his heel sinking into soft loam and mud. When he looked down, he saw the footprint. It was pressed deep near the base of the tree where water had gathered in a dark patch between roots. Three toes spread from a narrow heel, each ending in a sharp triangular point. The print was bigger than his head. Not a bird, or at least not a bird that one could not describe as anything but a monster. Something clicked again, closer this time.

Shimon turned and walked away from it very calmly for two dozen paces before he ran. Civilization, he decided, had regained much of its appeal. It was almost embarrassing to think that once being possibly killed by humans had seemed frightening. Being possibly killed by humans seemed almost nostalgic now that the alternative involved monsters in the woods. Humans were terrible, but they were terrible in a familiar way. Monsters wanted whatever monsters wanted, and Shimon did not really wish to find out.

The young man from the modern age tried to retrace his path, but the trees that all looked like brothers did not cooperate. The light failed faster under the trees and dusk thickened into a blue-grey confusion. Played with by the mist, the river sound came and went, sometimes on his right, sometimes ahead, once horribly behind him. The castle celebration had vanished entirely. He stopped twice to listen and heard only his own breathing.

Then, once again, from far back came that chittering whine again that pushed him to move. Cold settled into him with patient fingers. It crept through wet cloth, under his sleeves, around his neck. Thirst arrived next, dull and humiliating and he was forced to drink the liquid from the gourd. The spear caught under a root. He yanked it free and nearly fell. His swords banged against his hip with a clatter and his palm hurt from gripping his spear too hard.

Somewhere along the way he had begun talking under his breath, not words exactly, just fragments.

"River. Castle. People. Don't die. Don't die. Don't die." The forest opened without warning, and h e staggered into a stony hollow between low slopes, where the trees thinned and the ground rose toward a dark seam in the hillside. At first he thought it was only shadow. Then he saw a firelight. It was not much, just a small orange flicker, barely visible from the wrong angle, breathing against stone. A cave with a fire within. Shimon stopped at the edge of the hollow.

Every sensible instinct in his body advised him that approaching an unknown cave at night in a hostile fantasy-adjacent environment was one of the classic methods by which idiots volunteered for natural selection. However, t he fire changed the calculation. A fire meant warmth and fire meant someone had already checked that the cave did not currently contain a bear. And a fire meant a human being, or something close to it. Shimon crouched behind a tree and watched.

The firelight flickered from somewhere just inside the cave mouth, throwing an uneven glow over the stone. Smoke drifted out low and thin, hugging the dark. He could smell it now: woodsmoke, damp ash, and something fatty beneath it. Food? He waited, but nothing emerged. His legs shook. Not dramatically, just a small incessant thing that reminded him of his weakness.

"Hello?" he called, but his voice barely carried. He tried again, louder, shaping the word in Japanese.

"Hello? I don't want trouble." Something moved inside the cave. Shimon tightened his grip on the spear until his fingers ached. A man's voice answered, cracked and frightened. The words came rough, distorted by an accent Shimon could not place and by the strange half-second lag in his head before meaning settled.

"Who's there?" If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"Lost," Shimon said.

"I'm lost. I'm not…" The man inside shouted something, its meaning striking Shimon a heartbeat later. Enemy. Then the man came out of the cave. He was limping badly, one hand clutched against his side, the other holding a short blade. Blood had soaked through his clothes from somewhere under the ribs or belly. His armor was gone if he had ever worn any. His hair had come loose. His eyes were huge in the firelight, white showing all around the dark, and in them Shimon saw not malice but terror.

That made everything worse. The man probably thought Shimon had come to kill him.

"No," Shimon said, backing up.

"No, wait, I'm not—" The man lunged. It was not a good attack. Even Shimon could tell that. The man was wounded, exhausted, half-mad, and probably running on the last cruel reserves of panic. His step faltered as soon as he made it. The knife came forward too low, more desperate than aimed. Even without his enhanced reflexes he could have dodged it easily. But a bad attack could still kill. Shimon's body moved before his thoughts formed. The spear came up between them.

Not cleanly, not with skill, not yet, but strangely more than it had before. He did not thrust so much as shove the point into the space the man was entering, both hands locked around the shaft, his feet sliding in the mud. The man impaled himself, or that was the truth the young man told himself. Shimon felt the awful resistance of flesh protesting steel. Then the give, the awful, unmistakable sensation of metal entering meat, transmitted through wood into his palms.

The wounded man made a small surprised sound, almost offended, and his knife dropped into the leaves. For a moment they stood joined by the spear, the man staring back at him with dying eyes. Shimon stared back.

"I said wait," Shimon whispered. The man tried to speak. Blood spilled over his lower lip instead. He grabbed the spear shaft with both hands, not pulling it out, just holding it as if it were the only solid thing left in the world. Shimon yanked the spear out and the man sank to his knees. He remained like that for a few seconds before he fell sideways near the cave mouth, and the firelight caught his face. Shimon did not move. That frightened him enough to move again.

He bent and snatched up the dead man's knife, then immediately hated himself for doing it. The longer sword at his hip remained sheathed. Of course it did. He had not drawn it… The orange screen opened, confirming his sins. You have defeated a hostile combatant. 16 Experience gained.

"Don't," Shimon begged, but the screen vanished. He stood in the hollow, shaking harder now, while the corpse lay between him and the cave. The dead man had attacked first. The dead man had been wounded and scared. The dead man had attacked first. The dead man had thought Shimon was hunting him. The dead man had attacked first. Shimon repeated his mantra until the words lost meaning. Then he stepped around the body and entered the cave. The warmth struck him like mercy.

It was not much of a cave, more a shallow hollow in the hillside that narrowed into darkness farther back. The fire burned in a ring of stones near the entrance. A few branches lay stacked beside it, not enough for the night but enough for a while. There was a bundle of cloth near the wall, a cracked bowl, and something wrapped in leaves that might have been food. Shimon lowered himself beside the fire. His knees did not bend properly. They simply gave out, and he sat hard enough to jar his teeth.

The warmth reached his hands first. Pain bloomed as feeling returned to his fingers. He held them toward the flames and watched them tremble. He should move the body. That was the obvious thing. Bodies attracted things. The man was lying too close to the entrance. If Shimon needed to leave quickly, he would have to step over him. He did not move the body. He could not, for he did not have the will nor the energy for it.

Instead, he fed another branch into the fire and watched sparks spiral upward toward the cave roof. His mind began to narrow around the flame. Orange. Gold. Black wood becoming red. Smoke sliding out into the cold. The small language of combustion remained the same here, at least. Fire still ate. Fire still warmed. Fire still made darkness stand a little farther away. At some point he drank again from the gourd he had taken earlier, because thirst overpowered caution.

He found the leaf-wrapped thing and discovered a lump of cold millet or rice mixed with something salty and sour. He ate half of it with shaking fingers.

"I'm sorry," he told no one in particular. Night gathered fully beyond the cave mouth. The woods became a black wall. Sometimes things moved in it. Sometimes the movement was only wind. Sometimes it was not. Once, very far away, the chittering whine rose and fell again, and Shimon fed two branches into the fire at once. He sat with a spear across his lap, the stolen swords at his hip, and a corpse just outside his current accommodation. He really should do something about the body, his mind insisted.

But, his stomach turned at the very thought. So he stayed by the fire and tried to think. The system had given him experience. Thirty-seven before. More now. There was a quest. Survival. Survive until dawn. Optional objectives: kill more hostiles, find suitable shelter. Basic Class Selection as a reward. It was absurd. It was monstrous. It was, from a game design perspective, embarrassingly direct. No tutorial NPC. No safe starting village. No helpful inventory menu.

Just trauma, murder, and a cold little promise that if he lived long enough, he would be offered a way to specialize. Class Selection. He hated that some part of him cared. Shimon leaned closer to the fire.

"Tomorrow," he whispered. Tomorrow he would go to the castle. Tomorrow he would find people, surrender, lie, beg, negotiate, pretend to be a very confused low-ranking samurai, or whatever combination of social inputs seemed least likely to result in immediate decapitation. Tomorrow he would figure out whether this was Japan, another world pretending to be Japan, a game, a hallucination, or some cosmic clerical error. Tomorrow he would be rational, but tonight he would try to stay warm. The fire blurred.

He did not remember deciding to lie down. One moment he was sitting with the spear across his lap and his hands held toward the flames. The next he was curled on the hard cave floor with his back against stone, the stolen swords awkward beneath him, and his mind floating somewhere above his body where fear could not quite reach. He dreamed of home. Not clearly, his mind was too scattered for that, but a dream he had in fragments. The quiet hum of his apartment. The feeder clicking open. Mochi's paws on the floor.

Daigo's voice saying his name in that particular older-brother tone that turned concern into an accusation. Eri at the door with that annoying look on her face. The archive. The book. Red letters. Mist. A battlefield. A dead man's eyes. When Shimon woke, the fire had burned low to almost nothing as grey morning light seeped into the cave. For a few seconds he did not understand where he was. His body knew before his mind did. Cold stone under his cheek. Smoke in his throat. The weight of swords at his side.

Dried blood tightening the skin of his hands. Then he opened his eyes and the corpse stared back at him from the cave mouth. At some point in the night, the man had shifted. Or Shimon had, or perhaps the world had arranged itself for maximum cruelty. The dead man lay on his side facing inward, eyes half open, his mouth a dark hole. His expression had changed; In the firelight he looked terrified, but with the morning light he looked merely surprised.

Shimon stared into those dead eyes and the orange screen bloomed between them. Quest Complete: Survival Objective Complete: Survive until dawn Optional Objective Complete: Find suitable shelter Optional Objective Complete: Kill more hostiles Rewards Unlocked: Basic Class Selection 45 Experience gained. A second line appeared beneath the others as if mocking him. Congratulations. Shimon began to laugh and it was not a good sound.