It was hard to tell if I found the wolf, or if the wolf found me.

  I had been following the howls it let out whenever I could, so at least some of the credit went to me. On the other hand, it probably smelled prey.

  I was no expert on animals, but I was confident that wolves shouldn’t be this large. A normal wolf would be about as tall as my waist. This wolf was at least up to my neck, and I could feel its growls rumbling through the ground.

  A blue window appeared over the wolf’s head.

  [Wolf Lv.2]

  I slowly held my hand out, visualizing my dagger dropping into my hand as per the tutorial’s instructions. This was my first big mistake.

  The dagger dropped into my hand point first.

  I yanked it out of my hand in panic, then realized my mistake as blood seeped out even quicker than before.

  A helpful health bar appeared in front of my face.

  [HP: 17/20]

  That was problematic. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would, surprisingly, but it still hurt more than any pain I’d experienced before. I was now stuck using my non-dominant hand. Were wolves attracted to blood the same way sharks were?

  Here, I made my next two big mistakes.

  One, instead of sidestepping the wolf’s pounce like an intelligent human being, I stumbled backward like the idiot in a horror movie.

  Two, I dropped the dagger.

  I covered my face with my right forearm and felt sharp teeth dig into the flesh as the wolf’s entire body weight slammed into me. If my arm wasn’t out of commission before, it was now. My head smacked painfully against the ground, but the snow cushioned it somewhat. It was better than dirt.

  [HP: 14/20]

  Newly dagger-less and pinned down, my only option was to hit it.

  I swung my left fist at its head. A crack rang through the air, and the wolf’s jaw relaxed as it yelped in pain.

  I shoved the wolf off and scrambled for the dagger, grateful for the sunlight reflecting off the blade. My hand closed around the handle this time.

  The snow cushioned my shoulder as I threw myself to the side, narrowly avoiding the wolf’s next pounce. I slashed blindly at it and was rewarded with a yelp as the blade left a gash through its front leg. It wasn’t deep, but it was a start.

  I planted my feet carefully, my ankle screaming in protest. I ignored it. Better a little pain than my face being bitten off. The wolf wasn’t going into a berserk rage. It was circling me, watching me more carefully now that it knew I wasn’t helpless.

  The next time it sprang, I stood in place. I drove my knife upward as it knocked me over, and the blade sunk into the furry underside of its chin.

  I almost felt bad for a moment, as I fell backwards, pinned down by its body weight. This thing was basically an oversized dog. I liked dogs.

  Then its paw smacked into my arm, the claws digging into the puncture wounds it had already left, and I no longer felt bad.

  I yanked the knife back out, spraying my face with blood on accident, and plunged the knife into its neck. I didn’t want to prolong its suffering.

  [Wolf Lv.2 has been hunted.

  Reward: 20p]

  I shoved the wolf’s corpse off of me. I considered wiping its blood off on the fur, but that felt a little disrespectful, even for an animal that had recently tried to bite my face off, not to mention unsanitary. I could eat it, but the meat would most likely be too tough to chew easily, and I didn’t know how to strip an animal carcass properly. I wasn’t sure if hunting and eating wolves was even legal.

  Besides, the thought made my stomach turn. It was too similar to a dog.

  “Sorry, puppers. I need the points, and you attacked me first.”

  I yanked my sleeve up, shuddering at the cold. The bleeding had already slowed, most likely thanks to the same very cold making me miserable. However, this now meant it was at not only risk of infection but it would also most likely speed up hypothermia. I should be working on a fire, but it was hard to find dry wood when everything had been snowed on.

  Besides, I had wolf blood on me. I was fairly certain wolves weren’t big on revenge, but not everything here was natural. I wasn’t even sure if I was anywhere on Earth.

  I turned to follow in my own footsteps, thankful that there was no fresh snowfall.

  I was limping for around fifteen minutes when I came across different indents in the snow.

  Those were hoof prints.

  Horse prints, specifically. They weren’t cloven, so it couldn’t be a moose or deer. There was only one set, so it wasn’t in a herd like usual.

  Maybe a human had just passed through here.

  If there were other people here, surely they had some kind of medicine or healing technique. They might even be other Challengers. If they had horses, they had probably been here longer than I had.

  I turned to follow the horse tracks, then stopped when I saw something glinting faintly in the snow.

  I stooped to pick it up, brushing the snow off of it. It had feathers tied crudely to one end, and on the other was a rock carefully chipped to a point. It appeared to be a rough attempt at making an arrow.

  In addition, there was a trail of fresh blood a few feet off the track of hoof prints, along with a set of paw prints. Someone had hunted a wolf.

  It was still alive when I found it, but only barely.

  Its left leg was too bloody to discern how exactly it was wounded, and there were around a dozen arrows lodged in its fur.

  It was massive.

  The wolf was around the size of a horse, and its fur shimmered softly like the sky before a storm. It was a regal creature even mangled, weak, and surrounded by a halo of its own blood.

  [Wolf Lv.4]

  I knelt next to its head, tentatively placing my uninjured palm against the soft fur of its head. It was taking labored breaths, and its eyes remained closed even as I stroked its head.

  “I’m going to put you out of your misery, okay?”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Its paw twitched slightly, but it still didn’t open its eyes or try to attack at all.

  I slowly brought my knife to its throat and slashed as hard and fast as I could. I hoped it was unconscious.

  [Wolf Lv.4 has been hunted.

  Reward: 80p]

  I stood and wiped my hands in the snow, melting some of it to rinse off my hands.

  I couldn’t waste time. I needed some form of warmth to keep myself from contracting hypothermia, medical attention to my sprain, and a way to clean the bite.

  As I stood to leave, fresh scratches into the wood of a nearby tree caught my eye. The scratches still looked fairly new, and they were not done by an animal. They resembled carvings I’d expect from a kindergartner. Ordinarily, this would have been great news. It would have meant there were humans, and nearby ones at that.

  However, this drawing was…concerning, to say the least.

  There were humans. The issue with this was the fact that they were now potentially cannibalistic, and I wasn’t going to go to maybe-cannibals to ask for medicine.

  I sat back down to rest my ankle, sighing.

  “Challenge.”

  [1st Challenge

  Challenge Objective: Survive for 72 hours.

  Time left: 68h, 43m, 13s]

  I was dead. Three days would be fine if I were in normal temperatures, but here, there was no way I was living through this. I could barely even walk at first last night when Rounin had picked me up from the court, and now I was prancing through the wilderness like a very ill-prepared camper.

  Rounin.

  A sudden image of his eyes red and puffy with tears at my funeral flashed across my mind, and my heart clenched at the thought. I couldn’t leave him. Not yet. I couldn’t do that to him. I wasn’t going to die until I at least had the chance to say goodbye.

  My parents, too.

  The priority was fire since hypothermia would most likely kill me the fastest. The next was clean water to clean out the wound, and then ideally some form of antibacterial treatment. I could check the Shop to see if it had anything. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do for my ankle but let it rest, which wasn’t much of an option given the current circumstances. I didn’t want to eat the wolves, but my options were a wolf or a tree. The meat would stay fresh thanks to the cold.

  I stood once again, slowly stretching my ankle in the hopes that it would make it easier to walk. I snapped a partially broken-off branch off a tree, inspecting the wood. It was a little damp, but still better than most of the other sticks I’d seen. Logically, my best bet for firewood was dead branches still on trees.

  “Inventory.”

  I stuck the branch through the window and watched it vanish.

  “Close.”

  If I remembered anything correctly from the singular camping trip Rounin had once taken me on, I had to build a cone with smaller sticks and then put bigger logs down once a fire was going and not at risk of dying. Rounin had explained to me how some civilizations would rub a smaller stick against a flat piece of wood to generate enough heat through friction to start a fire.

  Then again, Rounin had gotten annoyed and chose to douse the whole thing with lighter fluid. Then we had to drive back into town to get ointment for the burns he had given me. Perhaps if I avoided the lighter fluid I could avoid making my dream last night a reality.

  This left me with one major problem. I had no pot or bowl to boil water in for sterilization. I could carve one out of wood and hope it didn’t catch fire. Or I could heat a clean rock and drop it in said bowl if I was fast enough and used my puffer jacket as oven mitts.

  I didn’t have any better options, so that was the plan I was going with unless I somehow came up with a better idea. Either way, I needed wood and access to the lake.

  I followed the footprints I’d made previously while looking for more sticks and a wood chunk I thought I could carve into a bowl of some sort, pointedly ignoring the horse tracks running perpendicular to my own. Hopefully, whoever was riding the horse didn’t get curious and decide to come back and look for me. Killing wolves was one thing. Killing humans, albeit cannibals, was entirely another.

  By the time I reached the lake, my ankle was screaming again, so I picked a less snowed-on spot to sit down and attempt to start building a fire. I scooped snow onto my ankle, now given up on keeping my socks dry.

  I chose a flatter piece of wood I’d found and a stick that wouldn’t snap the moment I applied a little pressure but was thin enough to be comfortable, and began rubbing the stick against the flatter piece with what I hoped was a moderate amount of pressure, using my knees to keep the wood still so I wouldn’t hurt my already injured arm even more.

  I was torn between wishing Rounin was here with all his usefulness and hoping he’d never have to experience anything like this. Then again, Rounin might actually find this fun, besides the hunting wolves part. He had always loved big dogs, especially huskies, even when they weighed more than him and could easily knock him over like a bowling pin.

  It took me almost a full half hour for the board to even begin smoking, and another five minutes for an ember to form.

  I quickly stuck a small stick on top and watched it catch fire.

  I was certain that this was nothing short of a miracle. There was no way I had done that correctly.

  I built a cone around it with all the smaller sticks I had like Rounin had taught me, and watched in fascination as a fire flickered to life.

  I carefully placed a bigger stick in place, then peeled my wet socks off and wrung them out. I was about to stick my feet back in when I noticed the faint blue tinge starting at the tips of my toes. I must be really cold if my feet were literally turning blue.

  Wait.

  Wasn’t a blue tinge a sign of frostbite?

  It seemed wet socks in freezing weather did result in frostbite.

  I dearly wished I had learned things like how to treat frostbite in high school biology instead of the exact specifics of mitosis. My best bet was probably warming my feet up and figuring out the wet socks situation. I settled for keeping my feet near the fire as I figured out how to carve a bowl.

  It always looked easier when I saw carving anything at all on social media. My dagger kept getting stuck and it was hard to carve in continuous strokes. To make it worse, my right arm was out of commission, so I was holding the bowl with my knees as I clumsily attempted to carve smoothly with my left hand.

  I gave up on a bowl shape and decided the best I was doing was a rounded dip in the wood just smooth enough that I wouldn’t drink pine (or whatever wood he was using) splinters.

  Once the bowl and fire were both fine, I chose the less frostbitten foot to place wet socks and shoes back on and hopped one-legged over to the frozen lake.

  I raised my dagger, plunged it into the sheet, and was surprised when the ice cracked neatly, almost beautifully. The sound was crisp and clean in the cold winter air.

  It was tragically beautiful, wherever I was. The sky shone softly with cerulean, coral pink, and comforting hues of green despite it being nowhere near sunset. The vast blanket of snow made it feel like a winter wonderland, and the forests of trees and the lake, reflecting the sky, made a wintry hell look majestic. Under the ice, even the water was clearer than any lakes or even springs I’d seen. The tragic part was that I was probably going to die here if I didn’t get my act together.

  I shook myself out of my daze and rinsed a small, round rock I’d found earlier in the water as fast as I could, shuddering at the bite of cold on my hand. It was horrifyingly cold. If I had chosen to step onto the ice and fallen in, I would have died very quickly. I tossed the rock into the fire to heat up and warmed my hands, then returned once again to rinse off my new bowl and fill it with water. I was amazed I hadn’t gotten a splinter yet.

  I set the bowl down far enough to probably not catch fire but warm enough for the water to at least heat up, and yanked my wet sock off once again.

  “Open Shop.”

  I scrolled through the interface, but all the health potions were 1,000p or more, and there didn’t seem to be any of the normal medical equipment. I would have to rely on ordinary methods for now.

  Three days. All I needed to do was survive. There was water, I’d somehow managed to start a fire, and I could still technically eat either of the wolves I’d already killed.

  “Uh…show health,” I requested.

  Nothing happened.

  “Status Window?”

  [Challenger Yule

  HP: 11/20

  MP: 20/20

  Title: LOCKED

  Skills: LOCKED

  Strength: Lv. 2

  Stamina: Lv. 2

  Agility: Lv.2

  Durability: Lv.0

  Magic: Lv.0

  Perception: Lv.1]

  My stomach dropped the same way my health points had. I didn’t know if the cold or the wound had dropped my health, but if I kept dropping health at a rate this fast, I was going to die very soon.

  I pulled the coat I’d bought from the Shop off, carefully wrapping the material over my hands.

  I snatched the rock out of the fire and dropped it into the bowl of water.

  I held my breath as the water steamed and boiled for a few moments before cooling.

  It had worked. The places where my jacket had met the fire were melted slightly, but the damage wasn’t as bad as I had thought it’d be, and my hands had still been cold enough that I didn’t think I’d even been burned. I slipped the puffer jacket back on, shuddering from the cold, and waited for the boiled water to cool. Thanks to the freezing temperatures, it didn’t take long before I could stick a finger in the water comfortably.

  I rolled up my sleeve, wincing as the fabric scraped painfully across the wound. The bleeding seemed to have stopped entirely, but the area around the wound was tinged red. I couldn’t tell if it was from cold, or if it was starting to get infected.

  I slowly poured the warm water over the wounds on my forearm and the slice through my palm, hoping it would clean it out at least a little. I didn’t have enough fabric to use as a makeshift bandage. I needed all of the clothes I had on me to keep me warm, and I couldn’t think of anything else to use.

  I tossed the rock back into the fire and filled the bowl with water once again, this time for drinking.

  I was going to try and relax for a few hours or so when a low growl rumbled through the ground.

  I turned and saw a wolf just as large as the one a few moments earlier.

  This one was not injured.

  It was not nearly as docile.

  And its ruby eyes seemed to glow as they locked directly onto me.

  [Wolf Lv.5]