“Well?” asked Lyrhea as she held a defeated hornbun by its leg while her arms were outstretched. “Are you not entertained?”

She was directing her words at the wolf-bear that had been watching her from a very visible point for the past few days, never attacking, never doing much more than observing her, and while she had attempted several times to outrun it, the thing was able to just be there when she stopped like it was a fucking slasher-movie monster.

By now she was used to it, and so she had taken to trying to keep herself from getting too creeped out by the voyeuristic creature. Of course, she was sure it wasn’t voyeuristic, but the fact remained that it was just watching her constantly, so she could afford to make some jokes at its expense in order to keep herself sane.

“No?” she asked. “Then down it goes.” She swallowed the hornbun live and whole, making this the third creature she’d killed as part of the second part of the Tutorial. “Just seven more to go.”

Lyrhea had been finding it difficult to find and fight hornbuns lately. She could certainly blame this all on the wolf-bear that was constantly watching her and making it clear to everyone that it was watching her, but part of it came down to the fact that she still sucked at hunting.

However, it was not like she could be expected to just ‘get gud’ just like that. There were no walkthroughs or let’s plays anymore, and there were no videos with helpful Indians teaching things, either. Not that they could have done much to help her situation, though. Not like they could have given her much information on how to hunt as a whatever the fuck that she had become.

Besides, while this world may have been slightly gamified, there was still the fact that there were no extra lives, continues, or checkpoints. If she bit the big one, that was it, nothing awaiting her but the cold embrace of the grim reaper. Or at least she expected that would be the case, and she didn’t want to put her own life on the line to check.

After swallowing the hornbun, Lyrhea began to attempt a new hunt. She had been forced (by her own hand) to use up a considerable portion of her reserves in the attempts that she had made to escape the watchful and not at all voyeuristic gaze of the wolf-bear, which had, of course, ended in abject failure, and now she needed to conserve as much energy as she could in order to eventually get more meat into her seemingly bottomless stomach.

As she tried to think of a way to hunt multiple hornbuns without putting herself at risk of being bodies by the little critters, she realized that she had overlooked a very key aspect of her existence. She slapped herself on the face in disappointment at herself and disgust that it had taken this fucking long for her to realize that she could do what she was about to try and do, which actually caused the ever-present wolf-bear to shift a bit out of… concern?

“Fucking brilliant, you dumb shit.” Lyrhea spat at herself as she began to use her hands to try and dig into the ground. “You really are a piece of work. You’re half-snake, but you’re also half-human, so use that higher-level thinking power for something useful for a change!”

…

It watched the monster as it began to dig. What was it hoping to accomplish like this? Its hands were not suited for that task, and though it was indeed making a rather deep yet shallow hole, it could not figure out what it sought to accomplish in doing this.

If it intended to dig a burrow, then it would take the monster many, many days and nights of solid work to do so. But, as the monster began to work with the holes that it was digging, it began to realize something that unnerved it.

The creature was fast, it had a dangerous chemical concoction built into its body, and it had the tool-making ability of a human. That was a recipe for disaster. Still, if it lacked the ability to use that all effectively, then it wasn’t a threat and would need more observation.

Besides, it doubted that the monster would do anything too stupid or brash while it knew that it was being watched by something more powerful than itself.

…

Lyrhea sneaked a bit closer and then lobbed a rock like a hand grenade near a hornbun. The animal reacted as she expected, and dashed off in the direction that was the opposite of where the rock landed and led the jackalope knockoff to run head-first into a pitfall.

The sudden lack of a floor was enough to cause the shoebox-sized monster a mix of issues, and the speed at which it was moving, combined with its own ‘fragility’ was enough to cause the creature to dislocate one of its legs, rendering it next to defenseless. The creature did the typical rabbit scream that one would see in certain videos on the internet for a while as Lyrhea approached it, moving slowly and cautiously out of the concern that maybe, just maybe, the monster was pulling the wool over her eyes.

Once she fully reached the animal, though, she was pleasantly surprised to learn that her tactic had paid off. She had expended next to no energy from her reserves in throwing the rock or injuring the hornbun, and the pitfall could be reused rather easily.

She would more than make up for the energy spent making and preparing the pitfall with this meal, and this would be her fourth of ten targets taken down in her task to finish Part 2 of the Tutorial. She dug her nail into the side of the hornbun and kept it there for a while until the creature slowed its movements and essentially went limp, at which point she swallowed it as she had done to three of its fellows.

As she reset the pitfall, she patted herself on the back for actually bothering to use her mental abilities this time instead of going full unga-bunga and using pure animalistic ways of hunting. Then she saw something that really caught her attention and sent the cogs in her head spinning.

“Okay.” she said to herself as she picked up a pair of rocks. “Maybe it is high time to enter the Stone Age again?” And, like her distant ancestors from when she was fully human, Lyrhea began her climb up the tech tree like a good ‘first of any sapient species’ ought to and banged rocks together, hoping to create… something.