I wake up with a sudden urgent bout of adrenaline pumping through my body. I hear a loud high pitched whistling noise screaming all around me. The alarm must have gone off. I instantly try formulating an action plan for how I am about to move. The thing that tripped the alarm was probably a harmless rodent or a rock or something, so I should try to calm down and steady my nerves before anything else. As I am trying to get my body under control, I hear a loud howling, then lots and lots of big paws moving around.

Oh crap. It must’ve been something dangerous that tripped the alarm. That sounded like a damn wolf pack. What with the freakiness of this world though, it’s probably something like a bunch of huge hell hounds or something. I try to rifle through my memories of Vegter’s lectures on the wild animals I might encounter out here. After a little bit of thinking I remember one of the creatures Vegter talked to me about that seems the most likely candidate in this situation.

He called it something along the lines of the sharp-toothed howler or something. I try to remember as many details about them as possible. he said that there howl is pretty distinct, something about it being extremely loud, usually heard within a range of a kilometer or so. He said that they use their howl to get there pack to come. He also said that a pack could usually number something around ten to twenty or so. He mentioned a couple physical characteristics too, like how their teeth are insanely sharp, and how they have a dark, glossy, crimson coat of fur surrounding most of their body, with white marks around the chest area.

Equipped with this knowledge I feel both better and worse about this situation. The fact that I know more about my enemy is obviously a positive. The fact that the enemy seems extremely dangerous is a negative.

I hope that my preparations are good enough to take on these wolves.

With this thought in mind I take my first steps outside my cave. It takes a second or two for my eyes to adjust to the light, but when they do the sight that greets me makes my heart stutter. Twenty or so fox/wolf hybrid looking animals, each one the size of a regular wolf and a half. Their glossy crimson coats are so dark they almost look like blood. I gulp. My heart starts up again.

I try to remind myself that I can do this, that I’ve prepared for this. No matter what I do though my body won’t move. Trying a different tactic instead I start feel my magic. I start lighting up the pile of kindling I set up for this situation. The use of my magic starts relaxing my body slightly, and with the pile of kindling starting to burn up, I now have access to fire balls. The sharp-toothed howlers startle slightly, noticing the smoke in the air. I hope that they just back off here, get startled and run. Instead though what happens is that they start swaggering over.

Guess this is unavoidable.

In the lead taking charge of the pack is a confident smart looking sharp-toothed howler. It’s a little bit bigger than nearly all the other sharp-toothed howlers around it. It looks a little young to be taking charge, but I don’t really know much about the social structures of these things to really know. My heart rate jumps up again as they start moving towards me. The only thing that stops me from freezing is the conscious awareness of the fact that I could honestly lose the new life that I’ve built for myself here, all gone, set back to zero. Even with this knowledge steeling my heart all I can really do is try to get into fighting position and summon two fireballs to hover at my ready.

They keep on coming closer and closer, seeming completely relaxed and almost casual. Once their within two or so meters of me though, they charge. The leader in an astonishing display of speed, appears before me, almost as if those two meters were nothing. He lunges at me his mouth full of sharp, serrated teeth. I put up my arm in defense so instead of catching my neck, he bites on my arm.

The moment that he clamps his jaws down on my arm, I feel a pain so intense, so visceral, I nearly collapse right then and there. But with that pain comes fury, a fury and wrath unlike any I’ve experienced before. In that instant all my fear turns to wrath and might.

The fury takes control.

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I believe that I start to have an out of body experience after that. I watch myself wrench my bleeding mess of an arm from the howlers teeth. Completely out of my control my body starts to conjure balls of air under my feet. The balls of air start to float up slightly, moving my body with them. Somehow, someway, my body keep balance on top of balls of air. I’m going to chalk that up to ork reflexes, since I really don’t have any other explanation.

The fury seemingly happy with how it positioned itself starts to summon massive spears of stone behind it’s back. While it’s doing that it also summons legions of small fireballs. With an animalistic snarl on it’s face, my body starts to accelerate the stone spears into the nearby howlers, killing the leader of the pack in the first barrage. The stone spears boom into the nearby bodies of the howlers, going through them and pining them to the ground.

The fury then starts to send the legion of fire at the howlers. The small fireballs move at incredible speed and crash into the howlers exploding onto them. Some howlers die right away, too much damage sustained for them to keep on living, others though live through the first barrage.

After the stone spikes and the fireballs almost two thirds of the howlers have died. Before the rest can even fathom how quickly the tables have turned, the fury summons a barrage of water and ice spikes, and sends them at the pack. This kills all of the rest of the howlers, leaving nothing but a field of corpses.

The fury seeing it’s task fulfilled, finally let’s go. As the rage starts to filter out of my system and I start taking conscious control back over my body, I start to feel this immense nothingness. After a couple of seconds I fall to my knees, a massive spike of pain ramming itself into my brain. It feels like someone took an old rusted axe the base of my skull. My body and my mind, pushed to their absolute limits, simply give up. Everything goes dark after that.

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The next time I open my eyes it’s to the sight of ruin and chaos. Huge fragments smashed all over, burn marks everywhere. Pieces of ice and pools of water splashed everywhere. As I start to regain my senses, I start to smell it. The smell of rot and decay. Of death and destruction. The smell is so strong, accompanied with the horrible sights, it makes me want to keel over right then and there. I try to contain myself, to at least reach the stream, but I simply can’t. I start retching. After a couple minutes of that, my stomach completely empty of all substance, I start to dry heave.

In that moment I try to reach over and hold myself, and in that precise moment, only then do I feel my arm. My poor wreck of an arm, I glance down to check it and only see red. A puddle of blood pooling under my arm. Assessing the damage only leads me to more dry heaving. Eventually I manage to gather myself. I know that if I leave my arm alone that I will most likely doe from the blood loss. I think of going back to the village, but I only have so much time. The next couple of options that I have access to, are to either cauterize the wound, or to try to fix myself with magic.

Cauterization would most likely mean permanent and complete loss of my arm, as opposed to magic which could completely save my arm. Magic though could back fire, leaving me a desiccated corpse. This decision though really comes down to my level of squeamishness, since, in all honesty, the pain in my arm is really starting to get to me.

And before I can take any executive action, I need to first find away to get rid of the smell of all these corpses. Making a big ol’ ball of air to trap the smell should hopefully work. To do this though I need to try and focus as hard as possible since the pain in my arm is a pretty big distraction. I squeeze my arm to try to stop the bleeding and numb the pain, forcing myself to take big deep breaths through my mouth to calm myself down. From there forming up the air ball is a slow and arduous task, taking a couple tries to actually get right.

After that is finished though I finally have relatively fresh air that I can breath, helping greatly with the nausea and pain. All of this still leaves me with the decision. burning or magic. Magic or burning. All I really need to heal myself is to draw life from the life around me and pump into my arm right? It really shouldn’t be that difficult. And even if it is difficult I refuse to get rid of my arm. I know I’m being a wuss but I just can’t burn myself, even if healing magic is something I’ve never trued before it has to be better than the alternative, right?

With these thoughts in mind I try to feel the life energy around me. It takes a while before I finally start to feel a thrumming, humming energy coming from the plants and the stream. I try to center myself as much as possible before attempting this, ignoring the pain in my arm, ignoring everything around me and trying as hard as possible to focus on the energy around me.

A little bit after that and I start to collect the energy into a ball, gently pushing it together into a (hopefully) healing ball. This takes a while as the life energy around me is pretty scarce. Once I finally have the ball formed I pray as hard as I can. I hope this works is the last thought that rings out in my head before I fam the ball into my arm.

The energy starts coursing all throughout my arm, healing all the damage sustained. Even with the small amount of life energy that was in the ball almost all the damage on my arm heals. With my arm healed I feel a huge load off my chest. “I’m gonna live” I yell out into the forest victorious.

I then remember that I am still in the forest and that I am still in no shape to fight off anymore predators. Well, crap.

I wait a couple more minutes before deciding that nothing is coming. I the start to silently and quietly celebrate. Hurray me.

Next on the priority list is putting all the howler corpses somewhere they won’t bother me. The first thing that comes to mind is to throw them into the river, but that’s probably a bad idea since it might just attract even bigger predators. The next thing that comes to mind is to just wrap them all up in a huge earth ball, which seems to be a pretty good solution. It’s just probably going to be extremely unpleasant.

And with that thought in mind I start to gather up the howler corpses, put them into a big pile and make a ball of earth around them. Hopefully this works out