Sick

The climb took forever. Every time I reached for the next crack in the bark, my leg came up late, and twice my foot missed and I hung there by the other three, waiting for the shaking to pass. My scythes felt like they belonged to somebody else. I didn't look down. I just kept going up until the branches got thin, and then I found a fork where two of them split from the trunk and wedged myself into it, back against one branch, legs braced against the other.

Then I let go of everything and just held on.

Hunger Clock: 81%

I'd been at eighty-nine when I finished the toad. That hadn't been very long ago, and the number was already falling, much faster than it should. My body was burning through the meal to fight whatever was in it. I watched the Clock tick down and did the math, and I didn't like it.

The afternoon went by in pieces. The numbness came and went in waves. Sometimes I could feel my legs, and sometimes I couldn't. The world kept going blurry at the edges, the leaves smearing together into green, and then sharpening again. Once I thought I heard the heavy steps and froze, but it was only my own heartbeat, or whatever I had now instead of a heartbeat, thudding in my head.

I remembered being sick in my old life. Lying on the couch with a fever, the curtains closed, my phone face down on the table because nobody was going to call anyway. Waiting it out alone. I'd hated it. I'd felt sorry for myself the whole time.

This was worse in every way that counted. I was alone in a tree in a forest full of things that ate the weak, with a poison in me that I didn't understand. But I didn't feel sorry for myself. That surprised me. When I paid attention, I could feel my body working. A warmth deep in my middle, a slow pressure pushing out, like it was fighting the poison one inch at a time without needing me to tell it how. It wasn't waiting for anyone to come help. It was just doing the job.

"Okay," I thought. "Then I'll do mine." My job was to hold on and stay alive until it was done.

Hunger Clock: 66%

The night was long. The frogs called from the pond, and things moved in the dark below me, and I stayed wedged in my fork and didn't move. My eyes went gray with the dark, but the gray kept swimming. I slept a little, in short, bad stretches. Each time I woke, I checked the Clock first.

Hunger Clock: 54%

It was light again when the bird came.

I heard it land on a branch above me, a heavy flap and a shuffle of feathers. Then it hopped down closer and tilted its head, looking at me with one shiny black eye. It was big, black all over, with a thick sharp beak. The kind of bird I would have called a crow in my old life.

[Sense]
Target: Gloom Crow ~ Lv.4
Threat: Moderate

The Sense notice came slow and fuzzy, as if the System had to shout through a wall. The crow hopped closer. It had seen me shaking. It had seen how long I'd stayed wedged in one spot. It knew exactly what that meant. To it, I was something that would be dead soon, and it wanted to get there first.

It pecked at my back leg. Not hard. A test. When I didn't strike, it pecked harder, and the beak rang on my shell.

I knew I couldn't win a fair fight like this. My scythes were slow. If I struck early and missed, it would just hop back and wait for me to get weaker, and I was only going to get weaker. So I did the only thing I'd always been able to do, even when I couldn't do anything else.

I stopped moving completely.

[Stillness] active

The shaking was the hardest part. I had to make my legs stop, and they didn't want to, but Stillness helped. It locked my joints the way it had on my very first day. The crow tilted its head. It pecked at me again, and I let it. It hopped up onto the branch beside me and leaned in, beak open, going for the soft spot behind my head.

It was close now. So close that even half my speed was enough.

I didn't try anything fancy. I didn't have it in me. I just brought my right scythe up and around one time, as hard as I could, and hooked it around the crow's neck.

It went wild. Wings beat against my face, and its claws raked at my shell, and the whole branch shook. My hook nearly slipped. I got my left scythe into its wing and held on, and I didn't let go no matter what it did, and slowly, slowly, it stopped. I was too tired to finish it cleanly. I just held on until it was done.

[Kill] Gloom Crow ~ Lv.4
XP gained.

I ate it right there in the fork, slowly, a little at a time. It was tough and stringy, and I didn't care.

Hunger Clock: 54% → 70%

Sometime after that, the warmth in my middle peaked, and then, all at once, it let go. The numbness drained out of my legs like water out of a sink. The world sharpened and stayed sharp.

[Status] Poisoned ~ cleared
[Resistance Gained] Toxin Resistance (Minor)

I lifted my right scythe and turned it in the light. It moved when I told it to, with no delay at all. I lifted the left one, then flexed every leg one at a time. Everything was mine again.

I stayed in the fork for the rest of the morning anyway, resting, letting my body finish whatever it was finishing. Below me, the pond shone in the sun. I could see the red frog on its lily pad again, still sitting there, still not caring about anything.

I'd been right to be careful of the bright one and wrong to trust the plain one. The mistake was trusting things I'd learned in a world I was never going back to. That was the real lesson, and it was worth more than the resistance. The rules I brought with me were guesses. This forest had its own, and I'd have to learn them one at a time.

Preferably not by eating them.