Riley stepped out into the clearing and the sunlight settled into her skin. The clearing felt too quiet, too neat, too still after everything that had happened only minutes earlier. It was strange how quickly the world around her could pretend nothing at all had happened. Her nerves did not get the memo.

  She scanned the tree line with slow, deliberate attention, her eyes darting between shadows and branches while her body remained perfectly still. A flicker flashed across her vision.

  ??Level 1 Monster Killed.?Congratulations

  ??Loot Drop Available

  “Shit,” Riley whispered to herself.

  Of course. Of course, she forgot the loot. What kind of rookie move was that. She had gotten so tangled up in her own panic that she had walked away from one of the only guaranteed rewards this twisted game world ever offered.

  The fact that she was even thinking about loot at a time like this was a sign she was feeling a little better. Or at least beginning to re-emerge from the state of shock she had been shoved into.

  She picked up her pace and headed across the clearing toward the tower. As she walked, she glanced one more time toward the tree line. Movement caught her eye. The dog. It was running along the far end of the clearing, a streak of brown weaving between trees before it disappeared again. Riley blinked in confusion. Of all the creatures she could have expected to spot right now, that dog was absolutely at the bottom of the list. But there it was. Again.

  “Okay,” she muttered as she opened the door. “Sure. That’s normal now.”

  She stepped inside and locked the door behind her. The new reinforced door would have held on its own but the lock offered a small layer of comfort she needed more than she wanted to admit. Artificial peace of mind was still peace of mind.

  She hurried across the room and unloaded her cart, dropping resources onto the floor without sorting them. They tumbled into loose piles of wood, stone, and wheat. She barely looked at any of it. Normally she would have taken her time to stack the materials, letting the small routine settle her nerves. But there was no time for that now. Her curiosity about the loot was growing by the second, pushing aside her distaste for returning to the battlefield she had barely survived.

  Something else crept into her thoughts. The animal. Protein. She paused as the idea crystallized in her mind. The meat sitting out by the river was not just leftovers from a terrifying fight. It was food. Pure, high value, desperately needed food. She had no clue how to process a dead animal beyond mangled ideas from nature documentaries and half remembered survival shows. She also had no way to preserve anything, so whatever she harvested would need to be cooked and eaten quickly.

  Her stomach twisted at the thought of cutting up the beast. A quiet wave of queasiness rippled up her throat. Part of it came from the trauma of the fight itself. The rest came from the thought of her butchering her own meat. Meat came wrapped in plastic. Clean. Sterile. Sanitized. Someone else did all the hard, messy work long before it reached a kitchen. She had never thought much about it before. Now she was responsible for that mess.

  “This is caveman shit right here,” she muttered.

  The words made her crack a faint, humorless smile. It was funny but this reaction was more so a coping mechanism.

  She moved faster, afraid that if she lingered inside the tower too long, she would lose all nerve and lock herself in for the rest of the day. The tower was safe and warm. And it had no caribou corpses. It would be very easy to spend the rest of daylight curled in a corner pretending the outside world did not exist.

  She forced herself to the door.

  When she pushed it open, she brought up her HUD map and scanned the tree line again. Nothing moved. The only flashing icon on the map was the loot marker near the river. No sign of the dog this time. Probably off finding a squirrel to torment. Or rescuing some other woodland idiot who had gotten into trouble.

  She started walking. There was no smile this time. Her expression sat flat and unmoving. She felt hollow. Robotic. It was like her emotional battery had been drained and everything she ran on now came from pure instinct. Walk. Breathe. Do task. Repeat.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  She told herself she had a plan. Collect the loot. Take what she needed from the animal. Wash the meat. Continue gathering the rest of the day’s resources. Realistically, she had no idea if any part of that plan was correct. Her head held fragments of half formed knowledge about processing meat in the wild. Things like removing as much blood as possible or rinsing cuts quickly to reduce bacteria. Things that sounded true but came without actual instructions.

  She had never been one to crave meat. A well-seared piece of protein sizzling over a fire wasn’t her first choice. Especially with the terror of earlier, she doubted she would ever get excited at the idea of cutting into something she had just killed. But now she needed it. Her body needed it. She could feel it in the tremble of her muscles and the way her clothes hung a little looser.

  She arrived at the scene.

  Everything inside her recoiled.

  The smell hit first, thick and metallic. Then the sight. Blood pooled around the body. A dark, crusted ring marked where it had spread and soaked into the earth. The caribou looked different in death than it had during the fight. Smaller, somehow. Like the fierceness had leaked away with the blood.

  “Gross,” she said out loud.

  ??Carnivorous Caribou Antlers

  ? Alert: Valuable Item Identified

  Excitement and nausea slammed into each other. Part of her was already counting the silver those horns could bring. The rest of her wanted to puke at the thought of sawing them off a still-warm skull.

  She pulled her hatchet off the cart and walked toward the body. She had nothing sharp enough to make clean cuts, nothing meant for butchering. Just a hatchet. Her hands shook and she had an overwhelming sense of not being qualified for any of this.

  She crouched beside the caribou and sucked in a breath that went on way too long.

  One hand closed around its foreleg. Still warm. Her stomach lurched like she’d been sucker-punched.

  She swallowed bile and raised the hatchet.

  Antlers first, genius. She shuffled to the head, grabbed a tip like it was a joystick, and started hacking at the base. Each chop sent a wet jolt up her arms. Blood sprayed. The skull made a sound she never wanted to hear again as it cracked open slightly.

  Two antlers finally thumped into the grass, heavy as guilt.

  She hoisted the leg again to reposition it. God, it was heavier now. She needed access to the torso because she had seen enough survival shows to know you needed to gut it.

  She lifted the hatchet high. Brought it down.

  Whack.

  The sound was awful. A hard, wet thump mixed with a sharp crack. She flinched, teeth clenching, but she did it again. Then again. The first few swings were stiff and tentative. Then something shifted. Not confidence, exactly. More like numbness. The fear dulled and the motion became mechanical. This was still horrible, still disgusting, still traumatic, but she was no longer crippled by it.

  In fact, it felt strangely cathartic. A release of pressure she had been carrying since the moment the beast roared at her. Something in her needed a repetitive motion to focus on, something that absorbed the leftover panic still humming in her nerves.

  The torso was tough work. She hacked and chipped and guessed at where to cut. She had absolutely no idea what she was doing. None. But somehow, after several graceless attempts, she managed to pry a chunk of meat free. It was uneven and jagged, but it was meat.

  She carried it to the river and washed it. She placed it inside her helmet, which she had scrubbed earlier. The metal felt safer than the wooden bucket she kept using for berries and wheat.

  She returned to the cart and started loading more wood for the fire she would need to cook the meat. The only sound in the forest seemed to be hers.

  When she had loaded enough, she turned to the loot chest she had ignored earlier.

  It sat on the opposite side of the dead animal. It was much smaller than the last chest she had opened. Its sides glowed faintly, the color brightening the closer she stepped. The glow was soft but noticeable. It was expecting her.

  She stopped in front of it.

  Part of her wanted desperately to open it right here. Loot was always exciting. Always rewarding. The chest felt like the one bright spot of this horrible scene.

  But her skin prickled. Her heartbeat quickened again. Something about the clearing felt off. Like the air carried a different kind of weight. Like someone invisible was watching her from the trees. It was not the dog. She could tell. And it was not the dead animal at her feet. It felt like something else. Something she could not put a name to.

  She glanced around. Nothing moved. No sound drifted in from the forest. The silence pressed against her ears.

  She crouched, grabbed the chest, and lifted it onto her cart, next to the antlers.

  “Not opening you out here,” she murmured.

  She turned toward the tower and hurried. Her eyes flicking constantly between the treeline and the HUD map. Her pulse thudded in her neck. The loot icon moved steadily behind her as she pushed the cart forward. The clearing ahead felt like a lifeline.

  She crossed into the open grass and quickened her pace even more, nearly jogging by the time the tower came into full view. Her chest tightened with relief she did not dare voice yet.

  Her hand closed around the tower door handle.

  She could not get behind that locked door fast enough.

  She had plenty of reasons to rush.