They started to bark and jumped to the first rock that led to me. It was large enough that four of them could be side by side snarling and barking.

I leveled my new spear at them and started to jab. They were doing that whole; I stab, they jump back thing. Then one would lurch forward while barking and snapping as I reset my spear.

Then one of them jumped forward as I was jabbing, and I made contact. My spear glanced off the rib cage and traveled down the body to pierce just under the ribs. It fell down, and I saw blood come out of its mouth.

It was down, but I could see it wasn’t entirely out, and it had hate in its eyes. So I jabbed at it again. This time because it wasn’t moving, my stone tip ripped out the throat, and I saw it convulse one last time.

I shuffled back just a little as one of the three dogs jumped onto my island. The wild dog was too close to jab at. So, I used the butt of the spear. I crossed it in front of my body and hit the dog with a sweeping blow.

As my spear hit the dog, I carried through, and the dog staggered off the dry part of my rock and it started to scramble to come back up. Right, when it got its footing, I brought my spear around my head and let it slide in my grip just a little so that I could get a longer bat. I hit the dog on the side and saw it get taken into the water and down the river.

I reset my stance and grip and looked at the last two dogs. They had been reinforced by three more and so weren’t fitting as well as they had. But, after my success in knocking one into the river, I wanted to repeat the trick.

They weren’t as focused as they should’ve been since they were biting and barking at the fifth dog that wasn’t fitting well. So I stepped forward with an overhead spinning bash towards the furthest right dog. I managed to hit it right behind the head and turned the neck. With that, it fell off the rock and into the water.

Before I could reset, the firth dog took a running leap at me and knocked me over, pinning my spear between it and me.

My head hit the rock and bounced a little. I saw three things all happening at once. The most pressing was an angry, snarling wild dog trying to bite my face off. The other two, less critical but urgent in their own ways, were the little white spots all around my vision and a red flashing word Dazed in the top right of my vision.

I forced my arms forward to keep him from bitting me and rolled, tossing this one into the water. Then, dazed, I stood up. There were now three dogs on the rock in front of me. I went to jab at one but felt that I would slow.

I saw that there was a green bar that had shown up in the top right of my vision. It was about halfway gone. Next to the bar, there was a vertical squiggle that looked like a single line drawing of a tornado that was flashing with a 4 in it.

I jabbed again at the other dog and hopped to get a better shot, yet I completely missed it when it jumped back. So we went full circle, and we’re back to the I jab; they move, they come forward, and I jab dance again.

I saw that the flashing number had gone away, and so had the little squiggle. I was hoping that meant I wasn’t dazed anymore and would have more speed.

I backed away from the dogs and choked up on my spear as far as I could. I wanted to hold it most of the way up. I was hoping that I could pool cue them, and if I could get one close enough, I wanted as much of my spear as I could to stab them.

I started to move forward again, and the dogs didn’t back up because the spear tip was too far away to bug them. So I attacked with a sliding jab. It was an attack where you loosened your front hand up and just used that hand to let the stick slide forward and not dip. The power was in the backhand and twisting the hips a bit. It wasn’t the most forceful attack, but it does make it so that, in most cases, it gets to the mark before they could see it.

One of the dogs had just come forward barking and snapping at me when I let my strike go. It was a straightforward attack. Most people and animals had problems seeing and reacting to movements like that, and this dog was no different.

I saw my spear hit the snout and slide up the left side of the nose, where it cut into the left eye. It looked like I might have blinded it in that eye which meant it was unlikely to be long for this world. Not having depth perception for a hunter meant it would get hurt more often.

With that hit, the dog I was fighting backed up and jumped off the rock back to the bank. I saw that it missed its landing and staggered when it hit.

I was hoping that it would be out of the fight. So, I followed up my blinding attack with a two-handed swing at the next one’s legs. I must have gotten it good because it fell over, and I heard a crack which I didn’t think was from my spear breaking.

That left one still standing on the rock next to me, and he was in the air coming at me, so I guessed that meant he wasn’t standing. My arms were crossed over my body as I finished out my swing like a baseball bat.

There was no way I could block as I did before, so I just finished the turn. My bag caught the weight of the jumping dog, and I started to go down on my face, but I kept with my spin and dumped the dog off on my left into the water. It wasn’t the fast area of the river, and the dog was a quick scramble back onto my rock.

As he was scrambling back onto my rock, I worked on regaining my footing. It was a close race, but I won and planted a right snap kick right to the underside of the dog’s jaw, causing its head to snap back. It looked like it was staggered just a little bit but not much.

It gave me just long enough to reverse the grip on my spear and drive it down from above onto the dog’s back. Happily, my spear plunged deep into the back of the dog, and the back legs fell out from under it. I pulled my spear out and saw blood rushing out of the deep wound. I was sure that this one was done for as it wasn’t even whimpering.

I turned back towards the rock to see what was coming at me next. Yet the wild dogs weren’t there. The dogs on the shore had ganged up on the half-blind one and taken it down and were and started to eat it. I saw the one with the broken leg, pulling itself away from me. I jumped back to the first rock and drove my spear into the dog’s side.

I looked around. I saw that the dogs chasing me had started to gather their dead to eat. Of the twelve in the pack, I outright killed three and knocked three more into the river, and I could see one of them being eaten, so I was hoping the other two were dead now as well. The pack had finished off the half-blind one for me. That left five in the pack.

End of combat

You have survived to the end of combat with several foe able to cause you harm

You have increased your level in

Spear (level 6)

New knowledge has been granted to you!

Taekwondo (level 10)

I only did one kick. I wondered why it gave me Taekwondo at level 10 unless that was what it felt my level of knowledge was? That could mean that I could unlock other skills that I’d from Earth. That could be good, but it wasn’t that important right now. What was important was those last five dogs.

The system said that I wasn’t in combat, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to just walk off my island if I didn’t have a plan on where to go next. I wasn’t wanting to fight more than one at a time because then I’d lose.

I looked around at my options, and I wasn’t liking them very much. I could stay where I was on my island with two dead dogs, or I could try to make a run for it. If I stayed where I was, then I’d end up getting hungry as I’m sure the dogs could outlast me if they wanted to. Running didn’t seem like a good idea because I wasn’t sure I could keep fighting and winning if I wasn’t at a natural choke point.

From my rock, I looked upriver as far as I could see, looking to see if there was a path I could take to cross. If I could run up about thirty more feet, then I’d come to some rocks that looked like they might get me at least most of the way across.

Of course, if I could cross, so could the dogs, and that would mean that they were behind me. However, if I could get them to chase me, then that would give me the chance to perhaps cut down their numbers some more.

It could also be that they felt like I whipped them, and they wouldn’t come after me again. That being said, I seemed to have no luck, so I was guessing that meant the dogs would chase me and try to kill me.

As I was thinking through this, I saw that the green bar, which I was guessing was my Stamina, was mostly full. It would be a good idea if I waited for it to fill that way; I could keep running for a longer amount of time. I took a knee next to the last dog I killed.

I was just not seeing a way out of this mess for me. I’d taken the pack down by over half, but that didn’t mean they would give up, and even if they did give up now, they might just come back in another day or two. It could even be the same pack that I saw tracks of back at the bush I slept under. Anyway, I cut it; I was looking at a fight. I guessed my question was when I was looking for the fight.

Just when I was starting to run, a door opened in front of me, and I stumbled into a study. I saw standing next to the door a strange man that I felt like I’d seen before but couldn’t place.