The trip back to “camp” was much easier than John anticipated. All he had to do, it turned out, was retrace his glaringly obvious tracks through the snow. Born and raised in Dallas, TX, John had little experience with snow, and so far, this convenient characteristic of the stuff was the only positive to weigh against a thousand negatives. As for the general cold, it still nibbled at him, but the fur-lined leather armor blocked most of it and made the return journey infinitely more tolerable than the outbound.

As John rounded the corner of the collapsed stone structure marking his penultimate stop, he encountered an old friend.

He couldn’t say for sure it was the wolf from the night before. Some gut instinct, however, told him yes. It definitely was. The beast was large for a wolf, easily the size of a leopard, with white fur and pestilent, yellow eyes. It watched him from twenty meters away, front paws spread wide and muzzle low. If it was a member of a pack, none of the others seemed to be with it, at least, making this mano y mano. Mano y lobo?

Panic swelled like a balloon, but a reassuring force in John’s mind reminded him he was not as helpless as he was the night before. Now, he had armor, and he had a weapon. He wouldn’t make for such easy prey. Despite this, he could not force his body to move. The prospect of getting even one inch closer to those claws and those teeth was entirely out of the question.

If John had been Polaris, his Frost Mage character in the video game Nordic Runes, an encounter like this would have warranted no more attention than an itch on the nose. He could have frozen the wolf with one of his most basic spells, or just done nothing and let his godly auto-defense kill it for him.

But John wasn’t Polaris.

John was John. He was weak, and he had no ranged attacks in his arsenal. All he had was a dull, stupid melee weapon he couldn’t swing until he was right into the teeth of the danger.

As always, John was completely useless. He couldn’t do anything but stand there as the wolf stalked forward, its lips peeled back and vibrating in a vicious snarl.

Move, you dumb fucking fat piece of shit! Move!

John wanted to move, but he couldn’t. The wolf was so close now, continuing its inexorable approach one silent paw at a time. The best John could do - the only thing he could do - was hold the axe in front of himself like a sad barrier, easily circumvented with a simple step to the side. With complete and unwavering hypnosis, the fear held him in place.

The wolf rushed forward in a white blur, injecting a dozen needles of lava into John’s thigh.

The agony jolted John’s body from its catatonia. Holding the axe in two hands he jerked downward, his grip nearly slipping when the wood cracked against the wolf’s skull. It refused to let go, dragging the leg backward in an attempt to pull him off balance. Twice more John drove the axe handle down, and upon his second hit the morphine of relief spread through his thigh. The beast finally released him, growling and bounding backward a quick two meters.

Warmth ran down John’s calf as he and the wolf circled each other, its fangs dripping with his blood, muzzle quivering hungrily for more. The malevolent, yellow glare of those eyes made John want to turn and flee. Knowing it would only get him killed, he desperately beat the urge down. He continued to step sideways, grateful his body still listened to his mind’s panicked commands, and he tried to navigate the blizzard in his mind. His thoughts refused to even slow, much less crystalize into anything coherent.

Maybe, though, when you had an axe didn’t need coherence. Maybe when the thing you wanted to chop got close, you chopped.

The wolf lunged, but this time, John didn’t wait around to get bitten. Channeling the worst of his little league at-bats, he swung wildly at the animal’s head and lost the better part of his balance, turning his face at the last moment and wincing his eyes closed. Bracing for a miss, John felt a crazed thrill as the blade sank home, triggering a growling thrash that nearly pulled the weapon from his grip. After a brief but intense tug of war, he managed to free the weapon. Finally, sensing the animal’s backpedal, he opened his eyes and looked.

His elation drained away. Crimson stained the fur of its shoulder, but the blood did not flow. It was a superficial wound, the equivalent of a single hit point taken from a pool of hundreds. The wolf continued to circle, unphased, its snarling teeth and yellow eyes no less malevolent than before. John now knew, on both a rational and an instinctual level, this enemy was beyond him. At his level of skill, equipped with this gear, he stood precisely no chance of winning this fight. He was finished.

His fatalistic musing was cut short when the wolf surged back into the attack. John stepped clumsily to the side and chopped down with his axe, the motion feeling much more natural than the awkward baseball swing of earlier, but this time he did miss. John’s screamed as needles clamped into his forearm. Again the wolf pulled John forward off balance, forcing him to take two staggering steps forward. Somehow, he managed to keep his feet. With what paltry strength he could muster he brought a knee into its chest with a dull thud, then another.

Relief bloomed across his arm as the wolf released and leaped backward.

You’re losing this fight, dumbfuck. You are fucking pathetic, as usual.

John was getting nowhere fast. He had to think. What did he have? His weapon was too dull to harm the wolf, and his armor was too poor to stop its bite. All he had on him were two rocks, one that produced sparks and one that didn’t seem to do anything, and a recently discovered satchel of unknown items - though he doubted the wolf would give him time to go sifting through it. It was possible he could view the contents in his inventory screen, but trying that would surely get him killed. He needed something else. Anything.

Scanning around in desperation, John finally realized where he was. Perhaps six or seven meters away stood the decimated structure containing the strange nest of eggs. Their shells glowed with eerie, pale light. A crude plan began to form in John's mind. He cobbled it together with instinct and intuition and mortared the pieces with tenuous, panic-infused logic. It had to be better than nothing.

Holding his axe before him like an empty threat, John backed toward the nest. With each step closer to it, a new feeling of unease grew within him. The wolf followed. It maintained the distance between them, stalking silently forward, eyes never leaving its prey.

If John had any chance at getting this right, he had to achieve a physical coordination he had never before reached in his life. The nest was a mere three meters behind him now. Something inside screamed for him to stop moving closer to that nest, insisting that the ravenous wolf bearing down on him was somehow the lesser of two evils. Finally, when he could take it no more, John let the arm holding his axe drop and stood vulnerable before his enemy.

The wolf lunged. John brought the weapon up just in time to meet the beast’s slavering jaws, giving it a bit for its razor teeth, and then dropped to his back in a clumsy fall that knocked most of the wind from him. In a graceless form of a soccer bicycle kick, John pulled the animal on top of him and attempted to kick it over his head. It was much heavier than he anticipated, and only one of John’s boots managed to properly get under the animal, but by some miracle, the maneuver worked.

The wolf staggered to its feet behind John, directly between him and the nest of glowing eggs.

What happened next would likely haunt John’s dreams for the rest of his life. Looking at the scene upside down, because he was on his back, John detected a shift in the half-crumbled wall near the nest. A large, reptilian creature - like a mutated viper with six legs - materialized from nothing, slithering down to the ground towards the wolf as it transitioned from transparent to iridescent white. Before the wolf could bear down on John’s prone form, the ninja lizard struck it from behind.

The wolf wheeled on the new threat, its yelp of pain overture to a chilling duet of auditory horrors. John scrambled to his feet and staggered away towards a nearby tree, bracing himself with each step for the attack from behind that would finish him. He cowered behind the trunk as that war of growls and hisses raged on, eyes closed and axe clutched tight against his chest, praying to unknown gods. It might have been a minute or it might have been a month, but only when silence had fallen did he open his eyes again.

Heart thundering, expecting to see one of the two creatures stalking toward his tree, John peeked around the trunk. Both monsters were near the nest. The wolf was still. It lay prone on its belly, its muzzle locked into the throat of its enemy. The ninja lizard was on its side, its fanged, viperous mouth opening and closing weakly, biting at nothing.

Wrestling his fear, John approached the grisly scene. When he neared, the wolf’s corpse began to smoke with neon blue mist, which rose from the flesh like vapor from dry ice. The smoke gathered above the body into a single stream that rushed towards John and flowed headlong into his chest. He collapsed to his butt, scrambling backward through the thick snow away from the strange substance, but there was no escaping it. A sense of uncomfortable expansion grew inside him for several seconds until finally, the smoke was expended.

John felt frantically across his chest piece, but his fingers found only unbroken leather.

After enough time had passed to be sure his body wasn’t going to melt or explode, John rose to his feet, bending down to retrieve his axe. Whatever that smoke was, it didn’t seem to hurt him, at least. In fact, he felt slightly more complete in some strange way, like he had been hungry and the blue smoke had partially sated it. Another mystery, then. It wasn’t like John had enough of those.

It may have been pity for the thing’s pathetic condition, or it may have been pure self-preservation, but for whatever reason, John raised his axe and brought it down on the ninja lizard’s neck. Even with all the time in the world - and even though his opponent was immobilized and laying on the welcome mat of death’s door - he couldn’t finish it in one blow. It took seven. Jon’s arms burned with exertion by the time the thing finally went still.

When neon blue smoke rose from the body and streamed into John’s chest, he tried to stay calm and let it happen. The strange feeling of expansion returned, and so too did the sense of sated hunger when the smoke ran out. This time, though, there was a sense of finality. Whatever that hunger was, it had been satisfied.

Part of John wanted to crush the glowing eggs, but the bigger part decided to let them be. The embryos might grow up to be terrible ninja lizard monsters, but they hadn’t done anything yet. More than that, though, it just felt wrong to kill something that couldn’t fight back.

Neon blue text flashed in the corner of John’s vision, but he ignored it. Now wasn’t the time to engage his probably hallucinatory RPG interface.

He was forced to step on the ninja lizard’s head to tug his woodcutter’s axe free. The metal came away coated in purplish blood, which only made the weapon look slightly less stupid than before - because it was literally the worst. His heart still beating a thousand miles an hour, John held the crude wood chopper up to his face, the ichor of a powerful monster dripping from its blade to the snow below.

“Savor this moment, Jackass,” he said. “In my world, we call that punching above your weight.”