John Robbie and snakes had never been on the best of terms.

When he had been just a small, toddling thing, John had innocently snatched up a grass snake in the backyard, curious about the fun, bendy creature with the funny tongue. Doing what snakes do, it bit him. As there are few places more terrifying to be bitten than the neck - some critical arteries there, after all - John had hurled the thing at the fence and promptly begun to cry. His attacker had slithered away, seemingly no worse for wear. Though, whenever John recalled the event, he liked to think it had been moderately dazed.

Several years later, at the worldly age of eleven, John and his older brother’s friends had stumbled upon a poisonous water moccasin beside a nearby creek. One of the boys, Rick or something like that, had somehow managed to chop the things head off and hang it from a string. John had learned a fun fact about water moccasins that day. Apparently, if you cut their heads off and hang them from a string, they will continue to reflexively bite at things for a while. John had then deftly evaded the decapitated viper’s head with which Rick chased him for several, hilarious minutes, then promptly ran home and began to cry.

As far as John was concerned, the score was snakes two, John Robbie zero.

Given his current circumstances, he fully expected his rival species to complete the hat trick.

The viper currently attached to his leg was unlike anything he had ever seen. Its scales were chlorophyll green, allowing it to blend perfectly with the hillside grasses, and its head tapered into a triangle from spiky brow ridges to a sharp snout. In John’s world, a triangular head had meant big-time poisonous guy. The body was thick and long like an anaconda, but not a real anaconda, a horror movie version that could crush cars and swallow people whole.

Johns's knees were ground painfully together as the serpent completed its first coil, its second already making its way around. His already weakened body began to drain even further, while ahead of him on the adjacent hill, the village he had been seeking taunted him with its closeness. As he watched it with desperate longing, the homes and the many pathways connecting them began to warble and swim as though the air around John had suddenly become an uneasy fluid.

This was it. This was where John was going to die. He would perish alone and terrified on a nameless hill in some alien world, his life having amounted to nothing more than a handful of meaningless numbers - a few thousand hours of Nordic Runes game time, a few dozen college credits and a pair of massively disappointed parents. In the end, John was going to die as he lived. Utterly useless.

Do something you dumb fat piece of shit!

The thought screamed through John’s mind, jolting him from the catatonia. Think, John. Think. Think. Think. Think. Think. Think. For fuck’s sake think.

His health dropped past fifteen percent and continued to fall. The serpent’s second coil completed its loop, adding another cable of rubbery steel to the first and doubling the already devastating pressure against his lower body.

John had to get this thing off him. Recklessly, he chopped down with his axe, managing to score a glancing blow against the steel-like scales of his enemy before the ricochet dug into his own leg. When nothing happened he struck again, and again, and soon he had raged into a mindless frenzy of axe blows that would have drawn a nod of appreciation from even the most unhinged psycho killer. John barely recognized his own voice as he screamed until his voice began to shred, utilizing every ounce of violence in his soul.

When his arms were nearly spent, and he struggled to even raise the axe for another strike, he opened his eyes and looked, expecting to see the gored, caved-in skull of a viper. His enemy was untouched. His attacks had not scratched a single scale. His health continued its downward plummet past ten percent, a strong dizziness now taking hold and threatening his balance

God you are fucking pathetic.

Something strange happened then. Amidst the pandemonium of his mind, currently under siege by every conceivable negative emotion and a quickly accelerating vertigo, John simultaneously experienced a moment of clarity, like a single beam of light penetrating the shroud of a storm. This, he understood, was a defining moment. He had reached a point in time that would force him beyond the John Robbie he knew, leaving him forever changed or sending him unceremoniously to the void.

He had to do something, but what? His weapon was useless. He was exhausted. He was dizzy. He was weak, diseased, poisoned, half-starved and wracked with pain. The panicked calculus at the back of his mind - which ran through the variables of his situation several times per second, it seemed - reached the same conclusion again and again. This enemy was just too strong.

Should he even fight it? It was a law of nature, after all. The strong ate the weak. Under the apathetic gaze of the cosmos, the viper’s might made it right, while John’s weakness made him wrong. It had been that way in John’s previous world his entire life. He had been looked over, mocked, disrespected and trampled up by seemingly everyone there, and apparently, it held true in this world as well. John was weak, and the weak always shared the same fate. They lost. They deserved to lose.

Likewise, the strong would always be victorious. Whatever that victory earned them - in other words, whatever they took from the weak - was their just due. It was simply the way of things, wasn’t it?

No. John would not accept that. Not this time.

Even the strong had weaknesses. For perhaps the first time in his life, John forced himself to truly look at his foe. He rode the wild, resurgent fear as he commanded himself to not look away, meeting those unnaturally large, reptilian yellow eyes resolutely as an equal, and not as prey.

Even the strong had weaknesses.

With nothing left to give, John nevertheless found hidden reserves of strength as he gripped his axe and rose it above his head. Before, he had closed his eyes with every attack, too scared to take ownership of his own violence. He had been too afraid to face the ire of something more powerful than himself, so he had hidden behind his own eyelids to avoid his inevitable failure. No longer. Those days were done.

Following the blade as it arced down, John watched with savage satisfaction as his weapon sank into his enemy’s eye, spattering yellow ichor from the ruined socket with a sickening pop.

The coils shuddered. John nearly toppled as the monster convulsed around him, its frenzy reminding him of a slug doused with salt as the thick cable of its body unwound itself violently from his lower body. Relief engulfed him. John felt only a numb tugging at his leg as the viper released, fangs dripping and eye defiled, then turned and disappeared into the dusky grasses.

“Say goodbye to depth perception, asshole,” John slurred at the retreating serpent.

He fell to a knee, grappling with the overpowering temptation to fall the rest of the way forward and let the blackness take him.

Get up you stupid fucking idiot! Get the fuck up!

John struggled to his feet, and after a moment of wavering, took a step. He took another. Soon he was moving continuously, staggering towards sunset in a decent imitation of Frankenstein's monster. Though he prodded his legs to run, they insisted they were no longer capable of that kind of exertion. He could only lean forward, using the momentum of the downward slope to push him further as his legs followed clumsily underneath.

His health had dropped below five percent. He couldn’t tell precisely how low because whenever he tried, he felt the equivalent of an urgent, blaring alarm, DANGER, DANGER, DANGER. He tasted the bitter irony of having a healing potion he couldn’t use. His disease negated healing effects. He undoubtedly had the “Bleeding” status now, as well, which would be accelerated by the use of a healing item until the disease was gone. His only hope lay ahead in finding a cure, but that hope was rapidly waning.

The hillside village went in and out of focus like an adjusting camera lens. It was close now, its many lights resembling an earthbound constellation of stars. How close it was no longer mattered, though. He would never make it. John was ravaged. His body and mind had taken everything they could take, and between the injuries, the poison, the disease, the starvation and the constant adrenaline, John’s burdens had finally overcome him.

He collapsed. The terrain had shifted to an incline, which was simply not possible for him. He crawled ineffectually until his arms gave out, finally sending him face down into cold grass. He allowed himself to go still. The handle of his axe vibrated like a jackhammer against his palm, urging him to get up, but the sensation felt miles away. John was finished. He was about to die, and part of him felt relieved that he wouldn’t hurt anymore.

As the world blackened from the outside in, and nothingness began to overtake him, John tried to speak to the figures rushing down the hill towards him.

“Snek. Wuf. Uld Fiv.”

His mumbles were barely comprehensible to his own ears.

“He needs a healing potion, now!” a man shouted.

“Nnn,” John tried, but he could not force his throat to produce the word.

The group reached him, promptly flipping him over, and the vial of healing liquid that would finish him was brought to his silently protesting mouth. As the glass touched his lips, and his mind slipped the rest of the way into oblivion, a woman’s voice rang clear above the rest.

“Stop!”