He grabbed the hind leg with his right hand, dug his feet into the earth, and pulled.
The creature moved approximately four centimeters.
He repositioned, got both hands around the leg, ignored the left shoulder's formal objection, and pulled again with his legs driving into the ground.
Six centimeters.
He let go and straightened up and looked at the creature and then at his own arms and then back at the creature. The reindeer was enormous. It had been enormous when it was running and it was more enormous now that it was lying still and he was standing next to it doing honest arithmetic about mass and friction and the significant gap between what he had apparently become and what Hercules was.
He could run. He could jump. He could not drag a dead animal the size of a small car through a forest with one functional arm and apparently standard human upper body strength that three weeks of berry and mushroom nutrition had done no particular favors.
He pulled the stone dagger.
The legs came off at the joints, which required more work than he wanted to spend on it but less than he had feared. He found the articulation points by feel, cutting through the connective tissue, working around the bone rather than through it. The front legs were thicker and harder. He left those. The two rear haunches were the largest pieces and they were enough, more than enough, more food than he had seen in one place since arriving in this forest.
He found the broad leaves nearby and wrapped each leg separately, layering them thick, folding the edges under. He cut vine lengths and bound them around each package, leaving a length free at the top of each to serve as a drag line. He tied both drag lines together into one and knotted that around his right wrist.
He pulled.
The leaves reduced the friction enough to make it manageable. Barely manageable. Manageable in the sense that progress was occurring and his body was only filing a moderate complaint rather than a severe one. He moved through the forest one slow meter at a time, the weight sliding behind him, stopping occasionally when the packages caught on roots and going back to free them.
He found the bone spear on the way, lying in the undergrowth where it had landed after bouncing off the reindeer like it had thrown itself at a stone wall. He picked it up without stopping.
He heard the rustle when he was about twenty meters past the clearing.
He dropped the drag line and turned with the stone dagger up and his weight forward.
The black rabbit was maybe eight meters to his left, moving through the undergrowth parallel to his path with the complete unconcerned confidence of something that lived here and considered him a minor feature of the landscape. It was the same size as the one he had killed. Same black fur, same bone horns, same red eyes that passed over him once without alarm or particular interest.
He stayed still.
The rabbit moved through the undergrowth and disappeared between two roots and was gone. The forest was quiet. He stood there with the dagger up for another few seconds and then lowered it.
He picked up the drag line and kept walking.
He reached the cave thirty minutes later and his right arm had developed a detailed opinion about the drag line knot and the specific circumference of his wrist. He unwrapped it, worked the circulation back into his hand, and looked at the two wrapped legs outside his cave entrance with the satisfaction of someone who had solved a problem through persistence rather than elegance.
He unwrapped one leg.
He cut into it and kept cutting, working the stone dagger through the meat and around the bone, separating it into pieces he could manage on sticks. He was not precise about it. He was not interested in being precise about it. He piled the pieces near the fire pit and built the fire and got it going and started loading sticks.
He waited thirty minutes because the fire needed it not because he was patient.
The meat came off the sticks and onto the flat leaf he had been using as a plate, a broad grey-green thing he replaced every few days when it got too damaged. He piled the pieces on it the way you pile things when you are not planning to share and not interested in presentation. A mountain of dark cooked meat stacked without ceremony or spatial consideration.
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He ate.
There was no other word for what he did that adequately captured it. Eating implied a social activity conducted at a table with some awareness of other people's presence. What he did was a private and total commitment to the transfer of cooked meat from outside his body to inside it, conducted without interruption or pause for reflection. He bit and chewed and swallowed and picked up the next piece before the previous one had fully cleared his throat. The meat was not seasoned. It was not accompanied by anything. It was meat and fire and that was the complete list of ingredients and it was enough, it was more than enough, it was the best meal that had ever existed in the history of meals.
Half a leg of a creature that had outweighed him by several hundred kilograms.
Dozens of pounds of cooked meat.
He finished it.
He put the last piece in his mouth and chewed and swallowed and set the empty leaf plate down and wiped his right hand on his tracksuit and looked at the fire.
The fire looked back.
He sat there in the full and complete stillness of a body that had received exactly what it needed and was currently processing that fact. His stomach was not uncomfortable. It was not strained. It had accepted the volume with a quiet efficiency that suggested it had been waiting for exactly this and had prepared accordingly.
Then the shaking started.
Milder this time. Not the full body reset of the first time, not the red vision and the heat and the complete loss of motor control. A shorter, sharper episode, his hands trembling against his knees, his vision going briefly warm at the edges before coming back. Twenty seconds, maybe thirty. Then it stopped.
He held his hands up in front of his face and looked at them.
Steady.
He stood up. His body rose from the ground without the negotiation it had required for the past three weeks, without cataloguing the specific complaints of each joint and muscle group before committing to vertical. He was up. He rolled his right shoulder, bent his knees, turned his head. Everything functioned. More than functioned.
The fatigue was gone.
Not reduced. Not manageable. Gone, the way a headache is gone after the right medication, completely and without residue. He had dragged two massive haunches through a forest for thirty minutes with an injured shoulder and cooked and eaten an amount of food that should have rendered him horizontal for the rest of the evening and he felt like he had slept for ten hours on a good mattress.
He stood outside the cave entrance in the evening light and let his mind work.
The rabbit. He thought about the rabbit first, because the rabbit was where it started. He had eaten the rabbit and seized and woken up unable to move and spent two days being rebuilt by something he didn't understand and come out the other side with legs that could cover ground at a speed that had allowed him to run down a reindeer and make a jump that had no business being physically possible for a human body.
The rabbit had been fast. The rabbit had been agile, had moved sideways at a speed that had surprised him during the fight, had kicked with a force that sent him into tree trunks.
He had eaten the rabbit and gotten legs.
He had just eaten the reindeer.
He thought about the reindeer. What had it done. It had run, but so had the rabbit and legs were apparently already claimed. It had been large and heavily built. The spear had bounced off its hide like he had thrown a twig at it, and he had been throwing with genuine intent behind it. The hide had resisted a thrown bone spear at close range without apparent damage.
He thought about that for a moment.
He thought about the seizure being shorter and milder this time. Less dramatic, less total, over in seconds instead of days. And he had come out of it refreshed rather than rebuilt.
His body had done this before. It knew the process now. It was faster at it, more efficient, the way any system improves with repetition. The first time had been a full installation. This time was an update.
Which meant whatever the reindeer was going to give him, it was already happening, quietly, without the drama of the first time. He wouldn't know what it was until he discovered it the way he had discovered the legs, accidentally, in the middle of something else, his body producing a capability he hadn't confirmed yet.
The possibilities opened up in front of him like a door he hadn't known was in the wall.
Every creature in this forest was a variable he hadn't tested. Every animal with an ability, a physical property, something his body might recognize and absorb and add to whatever he was becoming. He had arrived here with nothing. No system. No chosen one notification. No glowing text above his head telling him he was special.
He had gotten something worse. Something slower and more dangerous and considerably messier.
He had to eat things he killed.
He almost laughed. He stood outside his cave in a forest that belonged in an epic fantasy film wearing a ruined tracksuit with one functioning arm and the processed remains of a supernatural rabbit and a giant reindeer in his stomach and he almost laughed at the absolute specific stupidity of the power he had apparently been given.
It wasn't flashy. It wasn't a system. It wasn't magic he could throw from his hands or a sword that appeared when he called it. It was predation. Eat the thing, become a little like the thing, repeat indefinitely, try not to get killed during the acquisition process.
He looked at the remaining wrapped leg outside the cave.
He looked at the forest.
There was an entire ecosystem out there and he had only tested two samples. The rabbit had not been an exception. The reindeer had confirmed it. Whatever this was, it was consistent, it was repeatable, and it was apparently the only thing the universe had seen fit to give him when it dragged him here without his consent.
He sat back down by the dying fire.
It wasn't exactly flashy.
But it was something.