Fate is a fickle thing. Ulric had always felt like there was an element of chaos which operated in the background. Sort of a universal baseline "Fuck You" which reality enforced on all the sapients that occupied it. Some people said he was negative. Others said he was a real glass has a hole in the bottom of it kind of guy. He told them to prove he was wrong or go join a hippy commune cult and, please, before you reproduce, drink the cool-aide.

  Having committed himself fully to living this life to its utmost, Ulric refocused his efforts on identifying a proper foliage to apply his half-remembered basket weaving skills. Palm fronds would work best. This was not a tropical forest though and most of the plants seemed to be more of a deciduous nature. It wasn't semantics, it mattered structurally. Deciduous plants lost their leaves yearly. They did not invest unnecessary structural material into leaves which would be shed a mere seven months later and were therefore not of comparable rigidity or integrity as tropical plants, which would grow year-round.

  He would need to find a small tree or shrub that grew with a sturdy midrib and waxy enough to have the strength for a weaving. Or, perhaps, a tree with an appropriately fibrous inner bark. He'd need to use many more ribs than he had in his seminar, to account for the shorter leaves. No, wait, he thought, he'd make a wood wire frame and weave into it. The leaves wouldn't have to make up the structural portion of the basket in that application, and could simply be woven tightly enough to make a water barrier. Maybe a thin layer of the glassresin to finish, like a glaze. Might be closer to a pot than a basket, but whatever. When you got lemons and all that.

  Having some sort of mental image of what he wanted, Ulric hefted his spear and searched through the low thicket that was growing around the half-buried trunk of the dead arbor, whose mass yawned across the majority of the glade, nearly bisecting it.

  The break of a low limb was the only warning he got before the wolf-bear charged. A loud snap on his seven-o clock turned his head. A roar louder than anything he could have imagined coming from a living thing accompanied the rush of a shaggy furred monster about the size of a pick-up truck. He didn't get much more of an impression than that, it moved impossibly fast for something that big.

  Too fast.

  It closed a distance of thirty meters in about three and a half seconds, a blur to his turning head.

  Driven by instincts, the ambushed man dove aside, before his conscious mind had even grasped the roar, or the predator’s charge.

  Ulric was, yet again, in debt to the Watcher's blessings.

  He was tired. He was mana sick. He was growing hungry.

  He was also at the absolute human peak of his life. No scar tissue, no damaged joints. And, fast as the horror charging him was, it wasn't faster than the metabolic response to an absolute shitload of adrenaline.

  To understand what Adrenaline is, you have to understand that the average person walking around is an order of magnitude stronger than they look. That lady over there picking through oranges to find one she likes? She could pull your arms out of their sockets and crush your head in her hands. If she were sufficiently motivated. The body has natural limiters to prevent it from ripping its muscles and joints to bits in daily life. Professional athletes learn to turn those limiters off, which is how they tear their bodies apart jumping, sprinting, or performing motions that don't look like they should cause that kind of damage. Adrenaline also turns those limiters off. It's the body's all bets are off, there's no tomorrow, let's goddamn go juice.

  Ulric's body had moved before he'd even had time to think about it. Brain off, he was leaping away shoulders turned towards the beast's front leftmost paw, claws longer than his spear slashing to rip and tear in its passage. Clipped leaves from his woven kilt fell unnoticed behind him as he evaded. Through no intentional act on his part, the spear reflexively clenched in his hand clipped the massive form as it rushed, by nearly tearing it from his grip. Ulric hit the dirt awkwardly and rolled, scrambling on legs that forgot momentarily how to function for sheer terror.

  The blade must have made good contact because it yowled in a feral rage as it plowed by, sliding in a pivoting turn six meters past where he'd dove. The angle he'd taken had prevented it from being able to turn its massive head past even more massive shoulders and bite him in half, by centimeters, he’d heard the crack of teeth as a physical impact from its attempt.

  The musky stink of it was loud in his nose as he controlled himself, turned face the forest monster, his feet braced, spear held two handed with amber blade freshly broken in half, to his dismay. He was also able to get his first solid look at the monster hunting him. It really was the size of a truck. Better than three meters from haunches to way too goddamn big toothed maw. Like a mix between wolverine’s snout and bear body, it wasn't graceful. It didn't look like it needed to be, anything that took that charge square was meat. Claws as long as his hand, four of them per basketball sized mitts, dull like bear claws and not recurved like a cat's. Good news, they weren't scalpel sharp, they were dulled by being used to gain traction. Bad news, anything that strong wouldn't need them to be sharp to rip him to wet pieces.

  A thin line of reddish orange wetness on its left foreleg showed that it was, at least, capable of being harmed. His glassresin blade had penetrated deeply off the thing's shear momentum. He had a second to wonder if the wound would deter it before it growled deeply enough for his ribs to vibrate and set itself. Ulric thought it would charge, at first, until it reared up on hind legs and blasted him with a roar that contained all the power of a creature of untold fury and with a life steeped in blood drenched claws and dripping fangs.

  The next part wasn't conscious. The lizard that lived somewhere near the base of his spine had run the numbers and concluded that if the monster charged again, he'd be killed instantly. The only reason it hadn't been able to get him the first time was because it was fully expecting the speed and violence of the first charge to be enough, it always had been, and the softness of the ground hadn't allowed it to change direction at that speed. Prehistoric calculus concluded that the only response possible in the face of overwhelming violence was more violence, the badger gambit, to attack with reckless disregard or die to a greater predator.

  Which is why he was screaming towards the monster, having thrown his broken spear at it, belt knife somehow in his hand, with a hate he'd never known he had in his heart. The spear hit it in the head bouncing into the brush and it seemed frozen in confusion at the pitiful thing mewling in its direction, at the twig that glanced off of bone harder than steel.

  Ulric hit the monster in its chest, knife burying in its chest through hide that was nearly impervious. The brittle blade broke off immediately, wound inconsequential to the foe’s mass. His hands grabbed its head as it dropped to the ground burying him, and its hoarse growls shook bones as it prepared to unleash its wrath on him. The monster would never have imagined he'd attack it, it had been readying its charge, not readying itself to be charged. The stick had barely made it blink and the wound meant nothing. It would bite his head off as soon as it could set its claws on his body and pull him free.

  Without reservation, he realized through the fleeting moments he was screaming. Hate coursing through his veins. An instinctive rage unleashed at this thing that wanted his life and Ulric Einar found a moment of clarity at the bottom of that rage. This was his second chance. It was his last chance. His life pulsed before his mind’s eye. A world burned brown, scorched, frozen, replaced by a verdant forest of dreams. Denied him. Hurts that agonized him endlessly healed, replaced by youthful splendor. Stolen. Every sacrifice of his old life rendered pointless, every slight ignored to be eaten by this creature, agonies of body and mind, loss of every human connection by his action and inaction, countless nights drinking hoping he'd never wake poured through his mind like a dam opening. He willed death on the creature, willed it with all his soul. Demanded it. His soul answered.

  Magic, like a river of violent light poured through Ulric's hands, coursing lightning running a Jacob's ladder from finger-tip to finger-tip through the creature's brain burning violet that obliterated his sight. Channels prepared by a goddess overran with furious power, a core prepared but never used filled to overflowing inside his body, loosed the torrent of its might in a moment, fever burned out from the heat of the power unleashed as his core emptied. All the fire in the sun raced through his body washing away pain, emotion, and thought. Lightning raged for an endless moment, the monster in his coruscating grip spasming as its brain boiled inside its skull. Within that singular expression of his will joined to Varda’s field Ulric expended himself and his consciousness fled to blackness along with the magic that poured out of him.

  Awareness returned slowly. The first sensation was warmth. Not fever, but simple warmth, like a blanket. A rough one. Next was pressure, he couldn't move his legs. His chest was heavy, it hurt to breathe. Actually, it kind of hurt all over. Just some general whole body hurting. In spite of the pressure though, his body felt somehow lightened. Freed of some constraint, as if gravity had lessened its hold on him.

  Ulric opened his eyes to see the horrifying fanged maw of the creature open, yawning toward his head and he almost voided himself, before he realized that the beast was clearly dead and small streams of sick smelling vapor occasionally whisping into the air from empty eye sockets. It couldn’t have been long, that he’d lost himself, the thing’s brains were still smoking. His initial efforts to move were, at first, futile, but soon bore fruit, as he wriggled himself loose from its pinning mass. The immense corpse was only partly resting on him, it having thrashed sideways at some point while his death grip, literally it would seem, had kept him from being thrown free. His legs had caught under its chest which was why they wouldn't move. One of its forearms was draped over his chest. He lifted it away with an effort. It took several more minutes to slowly pry his legs out from under it. Thing had to weigh at least a ton. His ribs and legs were bruised where it had fallen on him, and where it had pressed him down to slaughter him.

  He felt an odd detachment from everything around him. Like he was piloting himself from somewhere above. Slowly, looking at the enemy dead before him, it came crashing back, and he realized he had tears on his cheeks. Not sadness. Joy. He was alive. He was more alive now than he'd ever been. He started laughing, deep and rolling, his hands reaching up as if to hold the suns in them. He came back to himself with a rush of exhilaration.

  He yelled into the twilight of the forest, a sound of pure victory. "THAT'S WHAT YOU GET! Fuck outta here with your shaggy fucking dead ass! I am motherfucking ALIIIVE!!"

  *PING*

  "What!?" he shouted, crouching fists raised.

  Too keyed up, Ulric almost danced a circle, looking for threats, before he remembered that he'd heard that sound before when he was sitting in his shelter.

  Fuck. His status had gotten him again, had startled him with its bizarrely artificial sound which only he could hear. He realized he was naked, his kilt not having survived the battle, its vines torn, leaves scattered in the violence of the attack and counter attack. As he looked down at himself, he looked at his hands, palms spread up. Hands that had drawn power through them and destroyed a monster with lightning. With magic. He clenched them into fists and let them fall before calling to the Akashic record, this time without his voice, trusting instead that will alone was sufficient to reach out to the Field of Varda’s mana.

  Ulric was rewarded by the joining of his senses to the Akashic imprint. Other than the mild injuries of a middling ape being smooshed beneath a behemoth bear-thing, he was unscathed. Better than that really. He let the image of his imprint on Varda’s Field fade, then summoned it again. And repeated that, like a child playing with a new toy. Magic, he realized, grinning stupidly in wonder, was amazing.

  Once more, because he could, he brought up the status to give it a more serious review, clamping down on the joy of being alive, because he was still in the middle of a wilderness that apparently held creatures such as this one, and the thought of meeting more of these, or a pack of them gods help him, took most of the starch out of his britches. So did the absence of mana saturation, that aetheric buoy was noticeable for its absence. A mana reserve of two percent said he was, magically, running on fumes, which tiredness was like a muscle he’d never used being clenched too long, but in his head.

  [Status]

  Good news, Ulric had come through the fire apparently. The changes to his status indicated that he might have been correct in that his mana sickness was a thing born of naivety towards mana, not an aversion to it. There was no mana allergy, just a…an adjustment that required, so it seemed, the active utilization of the aether-stuff. It wouldn't have made sense that an organism would actively destroy itself. Like evolving a stomach and stomach acids but not a stomach lining to protect it from its own digestion. His core, once untempered, now read as tempered. That was probably due to the use of it to channel mana, the system had been primed, so to speak. He was so relieved he could couldn’t believe it. A Damocles sword was gone and, in its place, was opportunity. Magic.

  He'd gained a title! And with it, nothing less than Varda’s own hand lifting him up from below, his stats had risen some thirty percent! A massive influx of raw ability that explained the weightless feeling, the liquidity of his movements.

  “Damn straight!” Ulric laughed aloud, relishing the absurdity for once.

  Killing the monster had increased his stats by a significant margin. For a few moments he indulged the curiosity again about those numerical indicators for his physical and mental parameters, but, alas, still came up dry. What were the numbers based on? How did they scale? Was he, or anyone else for that matter an endlessly growing entity fueled by this Vardan mysticism? Exponential advancement he discarded, he’d have noticed far more of an increase from so huge a jump. Interesting that, and it got his engineering mind turning, there was a scaling there. Linear growth? Logarithmic? Was there an upper limit or merely an asymptotic growth that soft capped human potential? Why had it gone up? Was it because he'd learned to use his body a little better? Did slaying the beast impart his core with some of its own potentia, subsuming its powers? Impossibility after improbability circled his poor overwhelmed thought meat.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  A head rush made him sit down, bullshit overload.

  Ulric was struggling under the load of too many unknowns, a near death experience, and a metric shitload of stress hormone side effects.

  “Ok there Chief.” Ulric spoke aloud, to curtail the budding mental spiral, “Let’s just calm down and get a handle on this. I have one data point and that is not fucking curve.”

  A battle with a monster. Who’d have thought? And his new body had carried him through. Barely. By the skin of his teeth, he’d survived that first lethal rush. He'd never actually pushed himself to that degree since waking in this place. Maybe an intense exercise regimen would further increase those stats, a thought he tabled for now, as he had bigger problems than a work out, like not starving to death. Or meeting another one of these…Forest Lords. He shuddered and avoided thinking further about that. Pants shitting terror wouldn’t do him any good, so he resumed dissecting the status.

  He'd gained a trait, Core Capacitor, which seemed to be related to the way he'd released mana in the attack. Only the inspection of this piece of Akashic mind fuckery gave him any real clue.

  He wished he could remember it better, but the whole thing was a blur. He hadn't had a clear thought since the great fucking thing had reared up like a tsunami and roared at him. If he'd had anything more than that foul worm in his body, he'd probably have shat himself. As it was, he'd almost certainly voided his bladder. Memory was hazy. He'd figured he'd never make it if it charged him. He'd thrown his spear, badly. He'd knifed it and done, like, no damage to the fucking thing. It had collapsed on top of him and tried to tear him apart. He'd grabbed it and done…something. All he had of that moment was the feeling of drowning in anger and hate. And wanting that thing dead.

  "No. Not wanting, WILLING. I didn't want it dead I willed it dead." Ulric said quietly. There was a difference and that difference is probably the only thing between him standing there over the Forest Lord's body and being messy shreds inside it. Magic was desire made reality. It was a call to the universe that the universe couldn't ignore. Awesome.

  Speaking of awesome, the spell was listed now, under Thaumaturgy.

  Ulric could tell clearly how the bear-thing had died. He'd run high current through its brain until it had melted. Probably the reason it hadn't been able to kill him in its dying moments. Electricity run through a brain like that would have destroyed nervous control. It didn't kill him because it couldn't, the muscles of its body weren't able to do anything but fire randomly without direction. Given the combination of Core Capacitor, maximized by overabundance of mana held inside of his core, this electrical thaumaturgic destruction had, apparently, discharged instantly. It was a hell of spell. And it wouldn't have done anything except piss the monster off if he hadn't had a hold of the giga-bear-thing’s head. A critical hit, so to speak.

  That was guessing, pure speculation. Who knows how much damage he could have done? After all, he didn’t have any discrete connection between mana and amperage or how that translated to injurious potential, and he only had half a mind on it anyway. What he did know was that it had been enough, and he hoped never to learn by how thin a margin that had been.

  Most of his attention now was fixated on the dead thing at his feet and the remaining sense of wonder at being alive. What in the hell kind of creature could that monstrosity have been that it’s dying was called a turning point of the entire region? What had he really done in killing it?

  Dark was closing in and Ulric wasn't in any kind of condition to deal with the corpse of the beast. He was exhausted, now that the battle-high had lifted. His body was bruised, he'd broken both his spear and knife, he was naked again, and it was time to go lay down next to a fire. Now that the mana sickness had lifted, he'd maybe get to sleep.

  Despite not having been struck once by the monster, just the crush of its head as it threw him down and the weight of it falling on him had been sufficient to almost crush his chest. If he'd been conscious when it had fallen on his legs they might have broken, but, out cold, they'd merely been bruised, too rubbery in his blissful boneless stupor to resist the crushing force. The rest of him was similarly mistreated. Bruised, but nothing broken. A not so small miracle.

  Ulric smiled as he thought he might have to reconsider his atheism. He'd met a god and been reincarnated. He'd seen evidence of the touch of immortal Watchers on the biology of the world. To say nothing of the majesty of this rolling plateau of Trees bigger than sky scrapers.

  Shuffling out of the developing rainbow thicket, Ulric sought out his water hole for one last drink before bed. Stopping to piss confirmed that, at some point, he'd definitely voided his bladder, because *ehem* production should have been higher. He rinsed his legs and returned to the shelter. Neglected overlong, the fire was down to a barely lit smattering of coals. Using a stick to prod those remnants together, it was the work of a handful of minutes to breathe his flame back to life. Once the tinder had caught, he stacked sticks in a log cabin arrangement around it, increasing diameter as they ascended to encourage their weight to fall in on the coals as they burned, and he gratefully retired to his leaf bed. A half-lidded glance to double check he wasn’t about to burn his shelter down around him was all he had left, before he slipped into a deep dreamless sleep.

  Bird calls woke Ulric from slumber, their closeness and assertive noise being both familiar and foreign. The pitches sounded similar to birds he'd heard on his hikes and outside his apartment. The patterns were wholly new, however, somehow jubilant feeling. What was even more incredible was how close they were. Ulric had heard the birds periodically on his trek to this place from where he'd talked to the Impossible. But they'd always been distant, far too distant to much more than know that birds existed in this world. Now though, they were clearly singing from around his shelter.

  Rising, Ulric noted, to his dismay, that the fire had gone all the way out overnight. He might be able to rouse it, with some fine tinder and a lot of effort. He also noted that the bruising had worsened and he was sporting a weird collage of purple discolorations across his left side and both legs. Pain was immediate but not intense. A nice background noise humming along in his body to accompany the birds in his ears.

  Ulric took a small, six centimeter glassresin knife with him and exited the teepee. It was predawn. He'd slept probably ten hours, at least. He was assuming, baselessly, the days were about as long as on Earth. Without a clock, absent established circadian rhythms, or any substantial evidence to go on Ulric was mostly just bullshitting. That there was light enough to see was without doubt. Already his eyes had adjusted to bring the gloom to higher clarity. He lifted his gaze to the treetops high above and saw the flitting sources of singing. They were fast. It was too dark to be sure but he had the impression of a bevy of colors, matching the flowers of the clearing in diversity. The air definitely held a chill and his skin responded by dimpling against it.

  Thankful for his cold weather predilection Ulric went out to the body of the beast, only taking a brief detour to gain and lose water. When he stood before the monstrous entity that had tried to eat him, he found himself in awe of it. It was impressive as hell, even dead. The claws. The jaws. The dense fur. The sheer size and obvious strength. Truly it had been a lord of the forest, unchallenged in its violent glory. It was also probably related to the lack of animal sign on his brief roaming journey of the day before.

  If he had to guess, the local wild life was probably pretty good at staying away from this monster. It still had that pungent musk to its odor, nothing that had functioning sense of smell would come close to anywhere that stink lingered too strongly. Death had done little to dull the monster’s musk. How the hell had it snuck up on him smelling like that? He briefly wondered.

  By staying down wind.

  Duh. Stupid Ulric, do better. An alpha predator would know how to do its business.

  Now that he was back here, looking at the monster in the cool morning twilight he was stunned again at the improbability of his still being alive. A million to one odds. At least. That's how likely it would be to ever kill anything like this again, in similar circumstances. If it hadn't been for the fact that he'd had exactly zero say in the matter, or any viable options to run, he'd have never contested a beast like this. It was suicide with extra, mostly painful, steps.

  Well. He was here. Nothing for it but to sack up and cut the bastard that had tried, and so, so, very nearly succeeded, to kill him into usable bits. There was not a little irony in this situation and it brought a smile to his face. Kneeling down by the back end of the creature, Ulric went through the procedures for cleaning game, once practiced at significant financial cost back on Earth, cost he’d paid a few times to lose himself in the fantasy of hunting purposefully cultivated game that there were more than almost pest-like fast breeding grazers like deer left to the crippled wilderness of his world. Start at the anus, circle with sharp knife, run up the abdomen keeping the knife parallel to the belly skin so as to prevent the tip from opening the gut by accident. Pull the guts out into a pile, separating the organs somewhat so they could be reviewed for signs of illness or parasites. Honestly, he didn’t even know what that might look like, so he was mostly just hoping the creature wasn’t contaminated by über parasites. Getting to the heart and lungs necessitated essentially climbing into the fucking thing and dragging them out of its body cavity.

  For once, his nudity was a blessing, there was no way to do this and not get yourself covered in gore.

  As much as the glassresin had proved to be a shitty weapon in battle, far too brittle, it proved an outstanding skinning knife. The incredible sharpness of the edge held up even against the hide of this creature which he doubted he could have cut with a steel knife. It took the better part of five hours, he estimated, gutting, skinning, and processing the animal. The bones he could do nothing with. They might as well be carved of titanite. Cutting through the tendons and ligaments had likewise proven a fool's game, currently. It could be done, but the sheer effort was not worth the result. As a result, he focused on removing the meat from the bones and not on harvesting quarters, the way you'd do with a deer or game on Earth. More like butchering a rhino.

  At last, the morning light having brightened into full day, he stood over a colossal hide onto which had been lain some six hundred kilograms of meat. To the side, lie the remains. Bones hard as any metal he'd ever machined with in a previous life. But surprisingly light. When he'd gone to pick up a femur, sure it would be nearly twenty kilos, he'd been shocked at how little mass it had. Contrary to his initial guess the animal hadn't massed much more than a ton and quarter. The muscle mass had, by far, outstripped its skeleton. In humans, the skeleton was right around one sixth the mass of the body. About a fifth was fat. Another twenty five percent was muscle. The rest was blood, organs, and various fluids. This animal, if you could even call something like this an animal, was probably only a tenth bone mass.

  But hell if that bone wasn't magical in nature. Nothing organic could hold up to the stresses that thing had put on its legs during that charge and pivot. He'd seen the drag marks from its claws and feet in the soil. It had arrested a motion easily surpassing ten meters a second with a mass of at least a ton in a space of about five to seven meters digging down nearly a half meter of soil. Bones should have broken under those conditions. Ligaments should have popped like twine. And yet, it had not only done it without damage, it had been ready to go again, immediately. The shiver that passed through him then had nothing to do with the air temperature.

  Ulric now had the task of transporting this monstrosity back to his shelter. Or was it even worth it to do that? Ulric's fingers snapped as he mulled over simply carrying or rebuilding his shelter here. It wasn't that far a walk to reach water. He didn't feel the urgency to have a rock wall at his back he had before. Especially not now that he knew things like this monster existed. It would have gone through his shelter like it wasn't there. Some sticks and leaves wouldn't count as toothpicks. If nowhere was safe, anywhere was fine. Right?

  There was the presence of birds to consider. That they had come so much closer indicated that the Forest Lord's passing had not gone unnoticed by the denizens of the wood. There would be other predators. There were always other predators. They would soon overcome their hesitation and enter the former lord's territory. Especially as prey began to traffic it with more regularity. Perhaps he'd been wrong about the forest being a green desert. Maybe the creature he'd killed had been so horrifying it had kept its territory effective cleared. Gods. What if there were more of them? What if a merely three meter long monstrosity was just waiting for the big one to slip up?

  "Fucking hell, I did not need that." Ulric announced.

  All the more reason to get his act together and get the fuck out of this forest, or, at least, to climb his way significantly up the tech tree. A lone man stood very little chance scratching a living from the landscape, especially absent agriculture of any kind. Or tools. Or livestock. A hard winter would, in all likelihood, kill him deader than the Forest Lord had tried to, unless he could add to the cards in his deck.

  In the end, the problem was solved in terms of efficiency: it was simply a matter of mass. Dragging the Forest Lord's remains to his camp would be an effort far great in proportion to its value to him. Although annoying, it would be much less work, fewer calories wasted, to simply rebuild his shelter, assuming it couldn’t be relocated in one piece.

  Those concerns were ill founded. Ulric, despite a lack of teepee certification, had done good work before, his shelter could be lifted and carried without coming apart. The loss of a few leaves mattered little and he proved strong enough to simply haul the teepee over to the kill. Generally, it was a bad idea to camp at a kill site. But if the thing you killed was the thing that killed everything else that was an exception to the rule. Creatures would avoid the smell of this place for a long while yet, he figured.

  Having reestablished his shelter, Ulric spent an hour coaxing his old fire to life so that he could transport some lit sticks to a new fire lay in his new campsite. Another two hours saw a small boxy hut with many sticks run in rows up its sides built. Inside this he hung strips of meat and started a small, low fire to which he kept fed in the leaves of one of the fragrant citrusy plants he'd tested earlier. He stood to the side of his improvised smoker and watched his handy work, white smoke rolling gently out of the top of it, sweet smell bathing the clearing. The leaves smelled like orange peels mixed with apple. It should impart some of its smell without drastically effecting the flavor, he hoped. The plant tasted exactly nothing like it smelled, having an astringency that he suspected would make it a potent wound cleaner. Well, bitter was something he could live with if it meant having some half ton of travel rations that wouldn’t go bad. He could potentially leap frog his way from one camp to another, carrying rations from one base to the next, resting, and repeating until he got out of the forest, if it came to that.

  While about thirty kilos of meat smoked, he grabbed a marbled half kilogram section and carved it into three centimeter thick slabs which he ran across a pole over the open flame of a campfire positioned outside the opening of his shelter. Juices dripped. The aroma was divine. Hadn’t he heard that bear was terrible eating? As awful as the thing had smelled in life, Mr. Lord of the Forest was cooking up nicely. Five minutes and Ulric turned it, exercising his everything not to pull it off and start eating. Now that food was imminent, the gnawing hunger that had persistently followed him the last two days had come to life. He had to swallow saliva every minute or so. Meat popped and bubbled. Another tortuous five minutes and Ulric slapped the slabs down onto a rock and stared at them. Let them rest. Let them rest. Let them rest….

  His mantra held him, watching the smoke roll off into the air, carrying the savory smell of freshly charred meat and fat. At last, his control failed him. He grabbed a slab, still hot enough to be slightly painful, and bit into it. When he lay somewhere on his death bed, he would never fail to remember this moment. This flavor. The juices poured into his mouth, grease carrying the taste dissolving into his saliva. Meat that should be tough as work boots chewed like veal. It was magic. It was wonderful. The first slab disappeared. The second lasted barely longer. It wasn't until this third that Ulric was willing to pause and take his time devouring it. He cut it with his crude glass-resin knife, making thin strips that he then shish-kabab'd over the fire to add to the char flavor.

  The meat sat heavy on his stomach. Three kilograms, maybe. He shouldn't have been able to eat that much without vomiting, but Vardan humans were capable of really packing away the proteins.

  Ulric at the moment was sprawled in the dirt, the area around his fire having been cleared to prevent sparks from catching leaves or causing subsurface fires. Unlikely but he wasn't willing to risk killing himself in an uncontrolled burn. The suns had risen brilliant, had traversed steadily as he worked, and sat well enough to the end of their journey through the sky. Warmth bathed Ulric's naked body. He slept, not realizing that he’d succumbed to a calorie coma before it snuck up and blackjacked him.

  The nap was brief, an hour at most. The chill of dark had set in, despite the low coals of his fire. Ulric was still full, still bruised, and now he was feeling the call of his leaf bed. Briefly stopping to stoke the fire, hydrate, and, finally, blessedly contribute to the forest’s detritus, he ambled away from his shelter. When the deed was done, buried and marked to avoid any accidents later, and he’d taken a short detour to clean himself properly, Ulric made his way back to the shelter. Slowly, carefully stepping in the dark, his eyes only barely able to make out the path from the rock pool, he turned in. It had been a good day.

  Ulric slept like a corpse but rose before dawn.

  And he felt incredible. He had energy again, his bruises didn't ache as much as they had earlier. The suns were at least an hour away from granting him light to see. He considered his progress so far. He had food. He had water. He had a decent, but not great shelter and materials for tools. What he didn't have was clothes, a weapon to hunt from a distance, a fast way to get fire, or any idea which plants could be eaten. He also had no idea how he was ever going to get down from this plateau. As soon as the sun rose it would be time to get back to work, but the next hour passed in contemplation of the problems and what his plan of attack would be to solve them.

  Daylight! Some leaves and wood saw his smoker continue to carry out its namesake. A quick drink settled Ulric's belly and he thought to collect samples of nearby plant leaves, stalks, and roots to determine what might be edible.

  After a few hours of trial and error, persistence paid its bills. A broad-leafed plant with fernlike fiddles and small, round violet like flowers, hid large tubers which, upon a smell and small taste test, resembled radish. Another plant growing in a cluster of small herby smelling shrubs held a nearly potato like root. A small bite discovered it to be nearly flavorless, but continued chewing had it sweetening in his mouth, the sign of starchy goodness. He gathered as many of these from the area as he could, intentionally skipping patches of them to prevent him from culling them. He had a few more likely candidates as food but didn't sample anymore, trying to keep his testing methodology somewhat rigorous. Ulric recognized euphoria in his emotional state. A possible side-effect of the meat? Maybe. Would that prevent him from eating more of it? Never. He'd eat that sonofabitch down to the bones.

  The rest of the morning saw a fairly sizable amount of starchy tubers buried in a shallow pit and covered by leaves near his shelter. Now to get back to processing His Lordship.

  Ulric used a small glassresin knife to separate the tendon from the muscles and reduce the slabs of flesh to cleaner cuts and then transferred the finished cuts of meat to a stack, finally he then wrapped the hide, unexpectedly heavy, in opposition to the lightness of the bones, around the meat. Processing that amount of dense muscle had taken the majority of the afternoon.

  He took a break for supper, roasted meat and "radish" shish kebab. His bowels moved once more, and he spent a few minutes cleaning up, glad that his body was normalizing, now that it had nutrition.

  Back to the beast hide.

  He cut away the excess, a heavy portion of hide which contained the head to mid back. This would become his new forest suit and bedroll. The fur was warm. That much he'd confirmed as he'd been plenty cozy lying beneath the beast's corpse. But. He'd need to tan it. Good thing he had a plentiful supply of brains. If only he could get to them.

  That problem stumped him for a while. He sat looking at the skull for a solid fifteen minutes, fingers snapping. Cleaned of meat it was scary as hell. Jaws that were clearly meant to crush bones and peel flesh. Teeth with cutting edges and canine fangs half as long as his forearm. The skull would be nearly impossible to penetrate, if it were anything like the leg bones. The glassresin wouldn't be able to cut it or drill it. The solution came to him as he looked at the hateful eyes of the thing. Just bore out the eyes and scramble the brains inside, they were already cooked. Pour the brains into a big trough or something and mix water from the pool to make a brain tanning solution. Voila!

  The trough was actually a tougher problem. The soil didn't hold water so great. No doubt an excellent clay lay somewhere beneath all the rotting detritus. But digging down that far? No chance. Instead, he went to the rock pool. The cracked and demolished rock had several pockets in and around the pool. He'd need to keep the brain tanning pool away from the water. Wouldn't do to contaminate the only drinking water he'd found. But a few minutes survey and a few rocks lifted had him a sufficient hole which appeared fit to hold water in the volume he'd need. Now how to transfer the water? Ah. That's right, he'd been working on a basket when the Giga-bear had attacked.

  Ulric went back to the thicket and resumed his project. There were maybe two hours of daylight remaining. He was doing the same task he had been when he'd been attacked, in the same place. A paranoid man would have been pretty nervous. See our paranoid man looking around significantly more than strictly necessary for the job at which he worked.

  Hauling his bundle of leaves and thin limbs, Ulric returned hastily to his relocated shelter. It was just before dark and he couldn't see much farther than he could throw a rock. Which in his current state was actually probably a pretty good distance. The cook fire had died down. A part of him wanted to experiment with the warmth potential of the Lord's hide, but the pragmatic part of his brain, as was usual, won out and he rekindled the fire after dropping off the leaves inside the shelter. It was better having the fire outside than in, he decided. Less heat, more wood burned to keep the space warm, but far less likely to set his shelter on fire. He'd sleep soundly not having to worry about waking up bathed in flame or dying unconscious to smoke inhalation.

  The smaller fur segment he’d cut free to use as bedding was hauled inside, its bulk and weight bending him over, even with his new strength. The thing had to mass close to eighty kilos and had a distribution that made carrying it without setting it on fire a cast iron bitch. Situated thusly, with bed inside shelter, basket materials stacked to the left side of the shelter and hide rolled up near filling the right side, he was ready to settle in for the night and relearn basket weaving. It took longer than he'd care to admit, with the wire frame coming easily but the weaving having to be aborted three times before he'd figured out how to get the layers to be even and even remotely possibly watertight.

  He retired to bed after completing a prototype basket, which had potential. Wrapped in the fur side of the pelt, warmth rapidly building in the insulating material, Ulric drifted off to sleep with what he would call satisfaction for the first time since dying.

  Morning found Ulric sitting up rapidly in a mild panic. He'd just had the first dream he could remember since he'd been a child. He'd been fighting the Forest Lord. Events had played out exactly as they had the first time. Until it had slammed him to the ground. He'd called for magic. Nothing had come. The monster had slammed its claws into his chest and ripped him from its head. He'd awoken just as it started to eat him alive. Sweating and bathed in the smell of the beast it was no wonder the source of the nightmare. Still. He shook for a solid ten minutes until the adrenaline worked its way out of his system.

  Ulric rolled up the fur and leaned it against the wall of his shelter. Hopefully he'd be able to fashion it into garments that smelled less awful. For now, he went through the list of things he intended to accomplish and planned his priorities.

  For starters, he'd kindle the fire and eat more of the bastard that had struck such fear into him. Next, he needed to replace the spear head with a better option. The sharpness had been good but the breakage on first contact had convinced him of the glassresin's inadequacy as a weapon. After that he'd check the smoker and see how his preserved meat was working out. If it had operated as intended, he'd be running it as close to all day as he could manage. And, finally, he'd test his basket to see if it could be used to fill a crater in the rocks near the torn roots so that he could brain tan the hide. He'd have to scrape the flesh side of it first, remove as much of the leftover fat and meat as possible.

  The animal products reminded him that there was potential in the use of the ligaments and tendons as tool components. A sinew bow string could be fashioned which would completely revolutionize his hunting potential. The glassresin, awful as it was in striking applications, would make for a tremendously powerful broadhead point on arrows. That was assuming he would be able to find suitable material for a bow stave and then be able to carve it into the proper shape. He'd never made a bow. He'd never made arrows. He'd only watched it done a bare two or three times while investigating various curiosities off the clock.

  Well, he thought, even if the bow string was a no, it would be very likely that he could use sinew to sew the hide into a sturdy and warm set of clothes. It wouldn't be pretty. It probably wouldn't fit right. But it'd be better than prancing around Fern Gully in his birthday suit.