The morning was grand. I loved to camp when I was on earth. It was a time that I could get away from everyone and not have to talk to a soul. I didn’t need to hear about their work problems or their home problems. I could just enjoy the cool of the day and watch nature. This was one of those mornings that made me smile. The sun painted the sky with corals and light yellows. The mist coming off the river caused a haze to spread and obscured my vision for more than about three hundred yards.

As I looked at the beauty around me I set out my day. “I have food for a few days still so it is time to make some tools. A knife and hammer would be helpful… replacing the hand axe with a real one would be nice too. Not that any of these are real tools, they are all going to be stone. Got to see if these skills are going to kick in for me.”

I ended up finding about a dozen rocks that I liked once a skill kicked in and helped. I thought that two of them would make good heads for hammers or axes, and a few looked like I could work them into a knife, and I even found one in the right general shape for a spearhead.

After I got the rocks, I knew that I’d need the right-shaped branches, so I went back to the woods and started looking. After a bit of time, I ended up getting three that were the right shape. I had to cut two of them down with the hand axe, so I was tired and sat down for lunch. I had forgotten to start a fire and have food cooking, so I only had dried fish and water.

I made one more trip out to the forest because I remembered that I’d need to get some vines to tie the heads on to what I was making since I still hadn’t killed anything I could turn into leather.

“Kill something, right. I have killed more in the past two days than ever before. Hunting should be fun since I don’t have a clue how to do that.”

Right as I said that I didn’t have a clue how to hunt I started feeling like I was wrong and that I could catch things. It was coming from the same odd discounted place that my other skill feelings all came from.

I was almost back to the river when I saw a hoof print in the soft dirt. It looked fresh, so I went to grab my spear and drop the vines. I thought I might be able to kill the deer, and then I’d be able to process my projects better. Better tools meant a better life; after all, the reason for tools was to make things easier.

I hurried back and dropped the vines near the rocks that I’d picked out, grabbed my spear, and headed out. I quickly found the hoof print again and started down a small game trail.

After about twenty minutes of walking, I came to a small clearing and saw that the animal that I thought was a deer wasn’t. Instead, it looked like one in build, and everything was right but the color and the horns.

This deer, and it wasn’t the only one, was a reddish-orange with large stripes down the side like a zebra would have. The horns, however, made me rethink my whole game plan. I was looking at real horns, not antlers, and they were straight.

Looking at the field, I saw that there were at least 10 of these, not deer. I wanted to call them orange Unnts, but I didn’t know where that name came from. I also somehow remembered that those horns kill if you weren’t very careful, and they would make great weapons if you could get them off.

“Nope.” I said.

Then I did what every sane person would do at this point. I turned around and went back to my work on building my stone tools. I was sad that I wouldn’t be able to take the animal, but I was very risk-averse since there was no medical center that I knew of.

I spent the next few hours working on my tools, and as I worked, I kept having problems not daydreaming. In the end, I broke two of my knife blades. I was thinking too much about how to build a trap for the Unnt.

I ended up giving up on the knife. I’d already finished the hammer as that was just lashing the stone to the stick and making sure it wouldn’t come out. I spent more time finding the stone and the stick than fashioning the hammer itself.

The axe had taken me a bit more time as I did knapp some of the stone off to give it a wedge-shaped head. I knew it would never be near as good at the axe I’d back home, but I also knew I was very unlikely to ever get that axe again.

I took my time working on the spear tip. This could make the difference between life and death even more than the other tools. I knew that I was pushing my luck to make this at such a low level, but I thought that I might be good if I took the time and did things slowly.

I ended up taking three breaks when making the spearhead. The first was to start dinner cooking, the second was to eat, and then the third was to move everything I’d worked on back up to my ledge. Once I finished up on the spear tip for the day I headed to bed. It had been a long day and now that I didn’t think I was being chased I felt that I could slow down and be more careful.

By your actions today

You have increased your level in

Primitive tools (level 4)

Tracking (Level 2)

New knowledge has been granted to you!

Stone knapping skill unlocked (level 0)

That night I dreamed again about being part of a tribe.

We were near a new cave, and I was sitting with an older man. He was showing me how to knap stone and flint. Whenever I asked him a question, he would just grunt and show me again what he was working on. It was a slow dream since it was just knapping stone. Finally, he ended by showing me how to make glue from fish bones and scales to glue the head of a spear to its shaft.

I woke up and thought about the dreams I'd had so far. They seemed to be tied to me learning new skills but not all of the skills I learned triggered a dream. Some were more in-depth than others were, but they all seemed to be linked. They also seemed to be showing me things that, when I woke up, I thought of as memories. Not that I thought back to the dream and remembered dreaming, but rather once I thought back to what happened in the dream, it was like the memory was mine.

As I got up and stretched, “Got to see if that glue works. I feel like it would and if I had been thinking about glue I am sure my primitive tools skill would have shown me how to do this.”

I got moving shortly after breakfast. I spent the first part of the day working on my spear tip. It took me a few hours to get the point made. Then I went looking for a nice sapling to turn into the spear I never knew I always wanted. I found a lovely hardwood that I felt would be a good tree and set to work with my new axe.

Cutting this tree was more demanding than back on earth but much faster than when I was working with the hand axe. It was amazing what three feet of branch did for the power of a swing!

Back at my beach, I sat down, made my stone knife, and used another stone to work it to a sharpish edge. I then started the hard work of making my new spear.

It took the better part of an hour to strip the bark off and work things so they were almost smooth. I ate lunch and then went back to it. I used the sand to rub the spear shaft smooth. I ended up with about a seven-foot-long stick, so I should be good if I messed up the shaft when mounting.

Before I fit the head on, I started to mess around with the shaft. It was a little long to call it a staff, but that wasn't too bad for me.

When I was younger, I was in martial arts for several years. I picked up a little bit of bo staff training, some Escrima, and I even studied Iaido for a while, but most of my time was spent in small circle Ju-jitsu and Taekwondo. I walked through a couple of staff forms I kind of remembered and worked up a good sweat.

After pretending that the spear was a staff for about thirty minutes, I sat down and attached the stone head to the spear. The head I made was about the size of my hand; it was more of a broadhead shape with a taper on the back to slide into a notch that was cut at the end of the shaft. I slid it into the shaft and then slammed the tip into the ground.

Next, I climbed up on a nearby rock and hammered on the butt end of the staff. I saw the head slide into the ground a bit but also saw it move into the notch a bit more. I then dug out the head and tied it on with the vine.

After it was tied, I made a hole in the sand where I had my fire and started to make glue. The whole process took me about an hour. I had just enough to cover the vine on the spear and on the axe when I was done.

I took the next hour working with the spear getting a feel of how it moved and worked. My old spear was just a stick with a point; this one had about a pound of stone at the end and was a foot and a half longer.

It behaved much differently. I walked through my staff swings again, seeing how it would work with a tip, and then I worked on stabbing a bush. I was using a bush for target practice because I didn't want to break the stone tip in a tree or not be able to get it out. I also jabbed it into the sand because I wanted to feel it when it was making an impact. After working with the spear, I checked to see if the vine was still holding up, and I saw that I was good to go.

After making the spear, I took my axe back to the woods and cut down about a dozen thumb-sized branches around four feet long each. I took everything back up to my ledge because it was getting late. I worked at my ledge, giving all the thin sticks a sharp tip.

I spent the last hour of the day on my ledge, thinking and trying to figure out the system that was my life now. I knew that in games that I'd played and books I'd read, I should be able to see my hit points if those were real, and I should be able to see more about myself. I could see my whole character sheet, and I was able to get messages about skills saying what they did, but I was still having problems with my stats.

I gave up as the sun left, and it got dark. So I settled into another night of sleeping in the open on my ledge. As I did, I got the normal message that I was expecting.

By your actions today

You have increased your level in

Spear (level 4)

Spear fishing (Level 3)

Stone Knapping (Level 3)

Primitive cooking (Level 4)

New knowledge has been granted to you!

Staff (Level 4)

“Well, that was nice. I got staff up to level 4 today just by a good workout. I did go through most of what I know, so perhaps I can work it up higher as that will be nice to have as a good backup since losing a tip of a spear was a reasonably common thing before metal tips.” I said to myself as I drifted off to sleep.

That night, I dreamt of Earth.

I was back in the dojo that I trained in as a teen. My sensei was there at the front holding a bo staff. He was a short man, about 5 foot 2 and around 60 years old. He always had a smile that would disarm anything anyone said. Yet his eyes would gleam with mischief when showing how to take someone down. It was that same sparkle that he had in his eyes when he called me forward.

His mouth moved funny like in an old dubbed-over Kung-fu movie, and he said, “Arn.” The rest of his words seemed to line upright as he kept talking, “Come to the front of the class. We are going to go over how to sweep with a staff today. While the staff is not the most common stick weapon you can find it is one that you can pick up just about anywhere. Brooms, mops, pool cues, or a broken branch, are just a few of the staves that you can find if you need a weapon. So knowing how to use one is important. Today we are going to show you how to sweep.”

With that, he stepped, hooked my leg with the bottom of the staff, and yanked the bottom back while pushing the top forward. I felt myself go airborne, and then I slapped out on the mat. I rolled, got up, and bowed to him.

Sensei laughed and said, “Alright let’s break this down step by step.”

The rest of the dream was falling down over and over again.

That night I woke up. I wish I hadn’t because I didn’t like what I heard. Down below me I heard barking.

“Crap, that doesn’t sound like just one of them. That’s a pack.” I said as I looked over the edge.

They were barking and jumping below me. They were trying to get to me. I could see just a little ways away with moonlight, and I saw that there was one on the rock that I used to jump to the other side of the ledge before coming down towards me. I saw it jump, and then it started down the narrow dirt shelf. It was kind of doing this whole low crawl thing that dogs sometimes do. The entire time it was snapping its mouth and growling and snarling. The other dogs looked like they were trying to get up the same way.

The one close to me was getting near the narrow spot when it slipped off the path and fell ten feet down to the ground. It whimpered a bit and then stood and began to climb back up. At this point, they were all on the jump-off rock or ledge. None of the dogs made it the whole way, and they were tearing up the narrow ledge as they tried to push on. This went on for a long time that night. They seemed to wear themselves out as dawn started to show up, but they didn’t leave. Instead, they hunkered down on my beach and seemed ready to wait me out.

I took a good look at the dogs. “Well you don’t look like the one that robbed me when I first woke up. But y’all are some of the ugliest dogs I have ever seen. Ain’t right neither, y’all’s ears are like a tea saucer on top of your heads. Honestly y’all’re ugly like you’re the butt end of every joke that went wrong.” I said under my breath.

The day was boring, they didn’t directly come up while it was light out but they also didn’t sleep. I hadn’t realized that as safe as I was I didn’t have a way to get away. I also didn’t have a good way to get more food or water. While they were a pack they were a pack of bullies as they fought with each other, barking and growling all day.

That night they started their attack again. I wasn’t going to just die here, so I wanted to fight back. The first one that tried the narrow ledge got my new spear right into the face. It went down yipping. Which ended up with a fight down below. It seemed that the pack worked on the idea of survival of the fittest, and any sign of weakness was bad. Which, in this case, included getting a nasty cut on your face.

I had hoped that showing that I was able to hurt them might make them back off and let me sleep. However, the dogs kept coming. I was amazed at how poorly they thought about this. Each one that came at me couldn’t move very fast, as the ledge was very narrow and slippery.

The night was long and loud. Every fifteen minutes or so, a dog would try the ledge, and I would stand up and spear it from the safety of my little barricade. They made no more headway but made sure that I was tired when morning came. I felt like they had done this before to animals that they had cornered.

As the morning came around I started thinking out loud again. I had to focus and list making was the best way for me to do it. “I’m out of water and getting no sleep. I am going to mess up if I let this keep going. They might not be eating much but they have water and can leave if they want.”

I slumped my back against the cliff face and tried to take a rest for a few moments. It didn’t last long as the dogs started to bark again. “I’ve got to get out of this place and keep them from following. Which means up.”

I got started on my escape. It was only a twenty foot climb which was more of a climb than I had ever done. Sure trees and ladders are easy, cliff walls are scary. I wasn’t going to try to take my equipment up with me, I would take a vine and tie it to my bag and haul that up after I got to the top.

I went slow and got to the top of the ledge, about twenty feet up, in under an hour. I was sore, tired, and unhappy. I had seen that the dogs had run off about fifteen minutes into my climb. I hoped that I had a way out that they didn’t know. I pulled my bag up and started to go, knowing that if they were coming, I needed to put some distance between them and me.

I hiked up the river with it on my left for the better part of the morning. I hadn’t heard anything behind me, which made me happy. It was about noon when I took a break.

The river was below me by about eighty feet at this time. It also had cut over to my left another 200 feet, so there was kind of a ravine just down the ledge from where I was. There wasn’t much growing down there, so I figured that it must flood, making it somewhere that I did want to make camp.

I pushed on after lunch and likely made about three more miles before I heard barking. I had not been running, knowing that I’d tire out. I had kind of hoped they had given up on me since I hadn’t heard the dogs since leaving my ledge.

“Well that sucks,” I muttered.

Then I did what every sane person would do. I ran and cussed, but mostly I ran scared out of my mind. Dogs weren’t something I liked at all. I was a cat person mostly because they didn’t get me muddy and didn’t leave piles in the yard.

I also was afraid of dogs when I was younger. I had been chased by them when walking home from school. So I wasn’t looking forward to these wild dogs catching up to me. They were everything I feared from all but the most trained dogs.

I went right for the drop-off and started down the slope hoping that the shifting ground on my way down might mess up the trail they had on me. It was a lousy slide down. Not having pants when sliding down a hill with gravel and loose dirt makes things hurt more than I wanted them to, and pebbles went places that they shouldn’t ever go.

At the end of the eighty-foot gravel tumble slide, I felt like I would be broken, but I could still get up and run and run I did!

I think it had something to do with still hearing dogs and being scared that I would get eaten alive. That gave me the boost to get moving.

“Can’t get caught!” I said as I looked at the river.

The river at this point was about ten feet wide and running fast. It looked deeper than where I’d been fishing, and the water was tumbling around like shoes in the dryer. I didn’t want to dive in and swim because I was sure that the rocks I had in my pack would make me sink, and my smoked meat would get wet. I’d drop my bag and swim if I had to, but I hoped I could get out of this without losing what little I had. So I turned and kept running up the bank. I heard the wild dogs barking behind me, but they were still up at the top and hadn’t taken a slide down yet.

I kept running until I was tired, which was only about another five minutes, and then I was sucking wind hard. That green bar had shown up again and was mostly gone now.

I slowed down to a fast walk; I still heard the dogs, though. The cliff to my right was getting higher and closer the farther upstream I went. I was hopeful that this was a good thing. I thought that might mean that they would give up on me in this spot.

“Might lose my scent if I can cross. Be for the best, there’s too many of ‘em.” I said through gasps. “If I can’t cross, I need to find a big rock I can fight on. Pick the terrain.”

It was about another ten minutes of walk-running before I heard the sound of the dogs closing in on me. My green bar was slowly going up as I walked and quickly went down as I ran.

The barks were much closer, I looked behind and saw that they were on my level and closing fast. I felt like one of those guys on TV being chased by the cop dog. Only there were at least six of them, and they were hungry.

I broke into a sprint and started in a more panicked way looking for a place to jump to. Finally, when the dogs were about ten feet away, I saw what I was looking for and dashed towards the rock. I jumped from the bank to one boulder and out to a mostly underwater boulder.

I was now standing on a space about twelve feet from the banks on either side and on a rock that had a dry place of about five feet. I spun around and looked back at the dogs.

There they were pacing up and down the bank, looking at me. Then, after what felt like an hour but was closer to five minutes, the rest of the pack showed up. They came down the river from the direction I had been heading.

“I didn’t give you dumb mutts enough credit. Y’all almost had me there,” I said as I readied my spear.

I wanted to think through how I was going to survive this fight but they didn’t give me enough time. 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, yelling at it. 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 it 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.

I was losing myself to the fight. I grinned. “Here doggie dog! I got a stick for ya!”

I stepped forward with an overhead spinning bash towards the dog furthest to my right. 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 fifth 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 happen at once. The most pressing was an angry, snarling wild dog trying to bite my face off. It’s breath reeked of dead meat and dog slobber. I was surprised when I noticed how close its teeth were to my face. 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 spear away from my body keeping him from biting me and rolled, and tossed 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 moved slowly.

I saw that the green bar 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 again dance. We did this a few times till the alert in my vision was gone.

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, I wanted as much of my spear as I could to stab them.

I started to smile again as I moved forward. The dumb dogs didn’t back up because the spear tip was too far away to bug them. So I attacked with a sliding jab. I just loosened my grip with my front hand and slid the spear forward. The power was in the backhand and twisting the hips a bit. It wasn’t the most forceful attack, but it did make it so that, in most cases, it got 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. 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 scrambled quickly back onto my little island.

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 by its silence.

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 started eating 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 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 too. 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)

“What the hell? I only did one kick! It can’t be based on actions here, it has to be including my knowledge from Earth. That means I might unlock something else,” I said.

The system said that I wasn’t in combat, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to just walk off the rock I was on. 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 didn’t like them very much. I could stay where I was just a few feet from shore, 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.

I sighed, “If I can cross they can follow. Then again if I could get them to chase me then we could finish this. But only if I could get down to those other rocks.”

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 guessed 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 guessed 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.

“This is all bad. Even if I won this fight these guys are going to keep at it until they get me. Best I do this now while I still have some fight left in me, and not in a few days of them chasing.” I said as I stood.

“Time to go!” And I jumped to the first rock.

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.