The week after the goblin was the longest of my life, and also the first in which I began to feel like a person who might not die.
I changed three things. I moved my camp thirty paces upstream, to a hollow beneath an overhanging bank where the creek curved, so that I had water on one side and rock on the other. I rebuilt the lean-to into something with walls, a proper frame of sturdy branches with cut grooves. And I stopped sitting by the fire at dusk with my back to the dark. I sat with my back to the bank, with the dagger across my knees and the doll beside me, facing outward, watching the trees.
Nothing came. The goblin eyes never returned. The black root remained where it was, across the patch of earth where I had left it, and I did not look at it more often than I had to.
Hunger turned out to be a problem I could solve, if I treated it like paperwork.
The creek minnows were a start, but a finger-length fish is not a diet. What I needed was meat. Over the next few days I bent my armature wire into snares, a few precious inches at a time, and set them along the narrow trails that ran through the ferns. I checked them twice a day, expecting nothing.
On the fourth morning, one of them held a hare.
It was the size of a cat, with grey-brown fur and, to my surprise, a short curved horn the length of my thumb growing from the middle of its forehead. It was still alive. I could feel its heart racing through the wire. A tag hung in the air.
Horned Hare Lv. 2
I will not describe what I did next. I did it quickly, and I apologized, and I did not feel any better afterward. But the panel appeared.
Deed recorded: First time defeating a horned hare.
Experience gained: 10 XP (Horned Hare, Lv. 2)
First-time-defeat bonus (Horned Hare): +60 XP
That night, for the first time in four days, I ate until my stomach ached. I roasted the hare on a stick over the fire, with the fat dripping into the coals, and I do not think any meal in a restaurant has ever been so good. I saved the horn and the hide. A man who has been hungry learns not to waste things.
The slimes came and went, small blue puddles that drifted through the camp like lost thoughts. I learned to kill them with the dagger, cleanly, at the core, without letting them touch my skin. Five slimes in all, over the week. Twenty-five points of experience. No bonuses, no applause. It was like adding pocket change to a savings account.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, flushed with hare and ambition, I decided to hunt something bigger.
At the creek crossing downstream, the mud was stamped with deep, cloven prints, wider than my hand, in a clear line toward the water. Deer, I decided, or whatever this world kept in place of deer. A creature like that could feed me for a week.
I had no bow and no spear, and I knew I could never run one down. But I have spent my life solving problems with patience, so I built a deadfall.
It took the rest of that day and most of the next. I found a dead log as thick as my thigh and dragged it a foot at a time through the ferns until my knee screamed. I notched two sticks into a trigger that would hold the log propped above the trail. I cut the hare's hide into strips and braided them into a long, tight trip cord, the way I had once seen it done in a documentary about people who knew what they were doing. I stretched the cord across the path at ankle height, and set the log, and stood back to admire it.
Nothing came.
I checked it every morning and every evening. Nothing came on the sixth day, or the seventh. A beetle crossed the cord once and did not even notice it. By the seventh evening I stood over that log with an aching back and a trap that had caught nothing but my own hope, and I felt like a man who has bought an expensive gym membership. I had spent two days of daylight on a plan for a creature that had never once come near it. Two days I could have spent gathering food.
I patted the log anyway.
"Well," I told it. "You tried."
It was on the fifth evening, while I was waiting for a snare to catch something, that I picked up a branch and started whittling.
I told myself it was a way to pass the time. That was a lie. My hands were bored. They had been doing nothing but survival for a week, and they missed the old work.
I shaped a body from a straight length of pale wood, and a head from a knot, and tied them together with a thin twist of wire at the neck. Shoulders, elbows, hips, knees: I hinged them with narrow strips of the hare's hide where I could, and spent wire only where nothing else would hold, the way I had always counted materials on the workbench at home. I carved a small, plain face with two eyes and a thin line for a mouth. It took me three evenings.
When I was finished I held it up by a string, and it hung there, a little wooden marionette about the length of my forearm, turning slowly in the firelight. It was a crude thing. The joints were uneven, and the face looked faintly surprised.
I know it was a waste of wire I needed for snares, but as I sat it down beside the doll, who regarded it with her usual serenity, I could not make myself regret it. Together they looked like a very small, very strange family.
Then the air lit up.
Deed recorded: Crafted a puppet.
Experience gained: 0 XP
Zero again. I could not help smiling. The Registry did not seem to think that making things was worth any experience at all. But it had written it down. It had written down the doll, and the hinges, and the face, and I thought of the first thing it had ever told me about the deeds I had done.
At Level 10, a class will be offered according to your deeds.
I did not know what that meant yet. But I had the feeling that the Registry was keeping very careful notes.
Then The boar came that night.
I had been cooking, and cooking smells carry. I heard it before I saw it: a heavy, crashing, wet-sounding approach through the undergrowth, a pig-like grunt, and the clatter of something hard on stone. I stood up with the dagger, and the doll, and a feeling in my stomach like a stone sinking in a well.
It came out of the dark at the edge of the firelight. It was the size of a pony. Its hide was a thicket of black bristles as long as my fingers, and its tusks curved up past its snout like two yellowed scythes. The tag above it was already glowing.
Ironbristle Boar Lv. 5
Level 5. I was Level 3. I had learned to respect the arithmetic.
It did not wait. It saw me, and it charged.
I ran.
I had not planned to. My body decided, the way it had decided to throw me between a goblin and a doll. I bolted down the path toward the creek with the boar's hooves thundering behind me and the ground trembling underfoot. My knee screamed. My lungs burned. Somewhere to my left, at the edge of my vision, something white flashed: the doll, knocked over, her glass eyes catching the moon.
There was one thing between me and the creek that I had spent three mornings resenting: the deadfall. A heavy dead log propped on a notched stick, with a trip cord braided from hare hide stretched across the path at ankle height. I had meant it for a deer, and luckily no deer had ever come.
The trip cord was a pale line in the dark. I jumped it, badly, and felt it catch my heel, and then I was sprawling on the stones.
Behind me, the boar hit the cord at a full run.
The log came down with a crack like a tree being struck by lightning. There was a scream, a horrible, high, almost human sound, and a great heaving thrash of bristle and mud. I scrambled around. The boar lay pinned beneath the log from the hips down, tusks tearing at the moss, eyes rolling. It was not dead. It was very, very alive, and it was looking at me.
I will not claim to have been brave. I will only say that I did it before I could think. I came in from the side, where the tusks could not reach, and drove the dagger in behind its shoulder, and held on while it thrashed and bucked and tore a long, hot line across my thigh. I held on until it stopped.
Then I sat down in the creek and I did not get up for a long time.
Deed recorded: First time defeating an Ironbristle Boar.
Experience gained: 60 XP (Ironbristle Boar, Lv. 5)
First-time-defeat bonus (Ironbristle Boar): +180 XP
Underdog bonus (target 2 or more levels above): +35 XP
LEVEL UP. Level 4.
LEVEL UP. Level 5.
Max HP: +4 HP 9 / 20
I read it twice, which has become my habit. Then I laughed, a wet, ragged laugh, with my leg bleeding into the creek.
Two levels in one night. The Registry, it seemed, paid generously for fighting above your weight. Fighting above your weight had also nearly killed me. I was beginning to understand that the Registry's generosity and my survival were two entirely different ledgers.
And I owed it all to a log. The same log I had dragged through the ferns for two days and cursed on three mornings in a row. I looked across at it in the moonlight, lying heavy on the boar's hindquarters, and felt something very close to love.
"I take it back," I told it. "Every word."
The panel changed once more.
STAT POINT AVAILABLE (1)
A stat point is awarded every five levels.
Vitality: HP, and natural resistance to poison and damage.
Endurance: stamina, and how much sleep, food, and water you need.
Strength: carrying capacity, and sudden explosive movement.
Dexterity: nimble handling, and sustained speed of movement.
Intelligence: processing speed, memory, and complex mystic arts.
Attunement: MP and its regeneration, and simpler mystic arts.
I sat in the creek with my leg open and considered the menu as carefully as I have ever considered a budget.
Intelligence was already my highest number, and I did not know what a mystic art was. Attunement was zero, and I did not have the faintest idea what MP felt like. Strength and Dexterity were tempting, but I had survived this week on wire, patience, and fear, and none of them were the problem. The problem was a single number, 9 out of 20, that kept me one bad night from not existing.
I chose Vitality.
Vitality 5 → 6
VIT 6 END 4 STR 4 DEX 7 INT 9 ATT 0
The wound along my thigh did not close. But the throbbing eased, very slightly, and I felt a little less like a man made of paper.
It took me an hour to bind the leg with strips of my hoodie, and another to limp back to camp. The fire had burned low. The doll lay on her side near the stones, a little muddy, and I picked her up and brushed the dirt from her face.
"Sorry," I told her. "I'll come back for you next time."
She did not look at all offended.
I ate boar that night. It was tough and strong and gamey, and I ate it anyway, and I fell asleep beside the fire with the dagger in my hand and the little wooden marionette tucked beside me.
Level 5. Five more to go.
Then, the Registry would have to say something.