When the loading screen dropped away and I came out the door the chick with the bow was giving me the evil eye.

“What the hell was that all about?”

“You’re too damn distracting, it would have got me killed. I had some leftover XP so I got you some stuff. Here.”

I pulled out the arrows and handed them to her. She smiled a little but got a huge grin when I followed it with the gym shorts. She put her bow down and turned around to pull the shorts on, which is weird because she’d already been walking around in front of everyone naked for a while. She turned around and grinned at me when she was done.

“Thanks. I really appreciate it.”

“Aww, hell. Here, this is for you too.”

I handed her the sports bra and I could see in her face when she realized I’d considered holding onto it. I shrugged at her.

“I don’t get out much and they’re phenomenal.”

“You’re kind of a dick, but thanks for the clothes.” She slipped into it and did that bend over and shimmy thing to get her boobs settled into the cups while she maintained eye contact with me. “You know if you tried being less of an ass sometimes you might get to see that kind of thing more often.”

I grinned at her.

“I’ll try to remember it. My name’s Jack.”

“I’m Debbie. Let’s go exploring.”

I made an after you gesture and followed her away from the camp. She set a steady pace, somewhere between a power walk and a stroll, but she kept her head on a swivel. One arrow laid across the bow ready to draw and her head moving back and forth in time with the bow so wherever she happened to be looking she was ready to fire. I relaxed a little when I realized she knew what she was doing. I was happy enough to just follow along and wait for the next monster. It didn’t take too long before I stopped her.

“Hear that clicking noise? We’re getting close to a crabadillo.”

She looked over at me with her head cocked like she was questioning my sanity.

“Crabadillo?”

“Don’t blame me, Tim named them. Come on, this’ll be easy experience.”

I pulled my axe out of the messenger bag, confident it could penetrate the crabadillo’s armor. Well, maybe not actually cut through it, but definitely smash all the soft organs underneath it. As I walked forward I couldn’t help but chuckle as I heard her soft voice mutter, “Who the hell is Tim?”

I walked wide around the crabadillo and wound the axe up like I was splitting logs, but before I could swing there was a Twang, Thunk, and an arrow transfixed the things head. I looked over at Debbie who just shrugged at me. The shot had only been ten yards or so but it’s head was pretty small so I was impressed.

“You do a lot of bow hunting, Debbie?”

“Not anymore but I took state in 4-H like three times when I was a kid. Wanna pull my arrow out? That’s kind of gross compared to the styrofoam targets.”

I put my axe up and switched to my knife as I dropped down to butcher the crabadillo. Debbie stood by me keeping watch, but mostly just trying to avoid looking at the carnage. In what I could only guess was an attempt to keep her mind occupied, or maybe drown out the sounds of breaking game, she spoke.

“Does it seem weird to you nobody is freaking out right now?”

“I don’t know. I imagine most of us are pretty freaked.”

“Bullshit, Jack. I’ve had more guys see me naked today than the rest of my entire life. I died horribly in the loading area, watching some wolf thing literally eat me from the stomach out. I haven’t eaten or drunk since I woke up this morning, and while I feel hungry and thirsty, it’s really not all that bad. I should be in shock, or have PTSD or something, and I’m relatively coherent.”

“Maybe you’re just made of sterner stuff than that.”

“Yeah, I’m Sheerah, hear me roar. I’ve got brass ovaries, so how come everyone else isn’t a basket case?”

Instead of answering I stopped for a minute to think about it, and didn’t really like the answer I came up with.

“Cause whoever stuck us in this wouldn’t enjoy the game if everyone gave up or just went apeshit. They must be adjusting something to keep us functional, serotonin levels or dopamine or some shit like that.”

“So you think whoever did this to us is watching?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Well fuck them.”

I grunted, but couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment. The crabidillo went into my bag and we continued on through the wilderness. After Debbie had mentioned feeling thirsty I couldn’t get the thought out of my head and my own craving for water kept growing. I gradually shifted our bearing from the relatively straight track we’d been going on, to further left where the greenery looked thicker. More vegetation meant more water was the thought process I was operating on, and it led me to make an even worse mistake.

There were a bunch of massive vines hanging down from the canopy of one of the larger trees, and I pointed at the mass.

“You ever watch one of those survival shows where the guy cuts the vine and drinks the sap?”

“Nope, but I’ve seen like every episode of Chopped. Don’t screw with ingredients you don’t understand. What if the sap is poisonous?”

“Then I respawn back at the door and you get to loot my corpse? I’m definitely gonna want my shit back so don’t get attached to it.”

I pulled my knife to cut the vine and reached out to grab it with my free hand. She warned, “I think this is a bad idea.” at roughly the same time my hand made contact with the vine.

It turns out that not all the monsters were animals. When I made contact with the plant it came alive. Giant tendrils of vine whipped out from all over the tree and started lashing at me. None of them were that thick, a single slash of my knife could sever most of them, sometimes it would take two strokes if I didn’t hit it square. The problem was that there were so many and they just kept coming. They already had me wrapped well enough I couldn’t retreat, and only wild swinging had kept my arm free so far. It was only a matter of time before I got tired and slowed down far enough they would have me.

“Help me, God damn it.”

“What do I do? There’s no place to shoot an arrow.”

My left arm was mostly bound to my torso now, but the hand was still free and I could contort far enough to just sink it into the mouth of the messenger bag over my shoulder. I pulled the head of the axe out of the bag and managed to lean far enough over to dump the axe at my feet, still wildly swinging my knife.

“Chop the fucking tree down.”

Debbie really did have some brass ones, because she dropped her bow and scuttled forward on all fours underneath the mass of vines to retrieve the axe. Without stopping she charged the trunk of the tree and went at it like Paul Bunyon. At the first impact most of the vines whipped back into the canopy off of me and as I cut the few remaining ones free, the others struck down towards Debbie. She dropped the axe in mid-strike and dove headfirst to the ground. Most of the vines fell short of her prone form, and the few that could reach her weren’t strong enough to lift her. I charged forward and slashed at them, leaned down and grabbed my axe handle before dropping on my ass and swinging my blade at the few vines that could reach me. We both crawled well away from the tree and the vines and just lay on the ground for a moment breathing hard. Debbie rolled over to look at me.

“You are just special aren’t you, Jack?”

“Oh, come on. You’re telling me you thought that was going to happen? Nice save, though. Thanks, Debbie, for an archer you make one hell of a lumberjack.”

She shook her head at me, but there was a grin on her face when she did it.

“Think that counts as something interesting? I say we head back towards camp and see if anybody else had better luck.”