I dragged myself over to my bag, which wasn’t far away, grabbed out some of my healing salves, and started to work healing up. It was good; I brought some stuff with me, but I wasn’t sure if I would get everything taken care of.

I got to work and applied my healing salves and started to bind wounds. Unfortunately, I had a few spear tips sticking in me where the wood broke off. So I had to begin to try to dig the splitters out. I was working on getting the one out that dropped me when I was running. I had been trying to twist around and pull it out but could not see what I was doing when Blink came over. She pushed my hand out of the way and used her teeth to pull the splitter out. When she did, more blood ended up pouring out, but then she licked the wound, and the blood stopped. Blink huffed at me and then walked around and curled up beside my pack, and started to go to sleep.

I sat there for a while looking at my leg, which now had a scab on it that looked a few days old where I had just been jabbed by a tiny spear. I kept coming across things that made me know I wasn’t on earth. Fighting with gremlins and then having my pet lizard heal a wound with a lick. Such a world that I now live in.

I ate a bit of food, and then it was time that I started to see if the gremlins had anything that I could use. It turned out that they had nothing that I could use as it was all crude horrid stuff.

I grabbed up my pack and then told Blink it was time to go. She looked up at me like I was a moron and then slowly stretched and started walking towards home. It took me until about an hour after dark to get home because of the condition that I was in. I still had a debuff of some sort, and my Stamina bar wouldn’t regenerate for me. Once I climbed back up to my home, I pulled my ladder up and passed out on my bed. This was one of the few nights that I didn’t see my stats because I didn’t drift off. I just was out like a light.

When I woke up the following day, I felt very refreshed. The healing attribute of my house core was able to speed up my healing, so I wasn’t feeling much like a dead man. I checked my wounds under my salves and saw that they were healed entirely and so I took off the salves and jumped into my bath to get the rest of the blood off.

I then spent the rest of the morning working on repairing my tunic, where it got slightly damaged.

I made up my mind that I would see if I could backtrack those little gremlins back to their home. From what I read, gremlins didn’t care what they ate, and the monsters came right at me when they saw me. I also had all the emotions of seeing friends die in my dreams to them and being attacked. Before I headed out, I wanted to make sure that I was better armored. They had issues getting through my heavy fur but went right in on my legs.

It was time that I got into armor crafting with what I could find. I didn’t want to be a sword and shield type of guy because, well, I couldn’t make a sword, and I had no training in using a shield. All the sword work I knew was for a katana, and so it didn’t pair well with a shield. That meant that I needed to make some better armor. I only had Unnt leather, wood, and stone to work with, and I wasn’t about to wear stone. For fighting with the gremlins, wood and leather might just make it, so I didn’t get hurt at all.

Since I knew that I needed to track down the gremlins soon so that their tracks didn’t fade away, I had to make my armor the second thing I would do. First, I needed to find them and then get ready to fight the rest of them. With that in mind, I needed to head back out and be careful not to be found.

I got my gear back together for my hunt and headed back to the site of the battle. I knew I had taken on a hunting party and won, so I didn’t think that I would get pressed more than that as I headed back to the site of the battle.

When I got past the spot that I found Blink’s egg, I noticed that there were lots of scattered tracks; little footprints everywhere. They looked new, too, which meant that the gremlins were likely hunting me down as I was trying to hunt them.

I started to try to track the biggest set to see where they were going. But, stupidly, I had gone into tracking mode a bit and forgot to be watching what was going on around me when Blink hissed from my back, and I turned to my right to see a larger gremlin. Where the other gremlins stood about two feet tall, this one was around three feet or so. Also, he had a metal knife in his hand and had swung it at me already!

I brought my staff around just a little too slow and the knife sliced right across my arm. Searing pain shot right up my right arm as the knife chunked out a wedge of my arm. I dropped my staff by reflex and grabbed my arm with my left hand, and stepped back. I felt my pack push low as Blink launched over my head onto the knife-wielder. That push was just enough to remind me that now was not the time to worry about a bleeding arm.

Blink had the gremlin on the ground, but the knife looked like it was about to stab her. I rushed back in and grabbed the gremlin with both hands around the wrist, and yanked it back. I heard a snap as I broke the wrist, and then I heard a scream of pain come from it as Blink sunk her teeth into its neck.

Just like that, the fight was over! I looked down at my right arm to see a flap of skin hanging off and free-flowing blood.

“Blink will your lick fix this?” I asked as I sat down.

Blink came over, and as I held the flap of skin in place, she started to lick the wound. I saw the blood stop, and then I saw that it began to heal up. My bleeding debuff vanished, but my HP didn’t go up. So I was down to about half from getting hit once by a knife in the arm.

I grabbed the knife and put it in my belt, and searched the larger gremlin to see if he had anything else noteworthy.

I was already surprised to find the knife, so I wasn’t expecting much, but he had a little bag and a leather belt. In the pouch on his belt were a ring and some shiny rocks. I took it all and put it in my pack, and told Blink, “We are heading back, girl. This is more than I was expecting, and I’m not sure if we should be here right now.”

I was about to take the time to brush out all of the tracks of the fight when I heard the sound of gremlins running and yelling. So down the trail, I went and back across the washout where I found Blink. By the time I got to the top of the ravine, I had heard the yells and yips from the hoard. Looking across, I saw about 40 gremlins, all milling around the top of the other side. They looked like they both wanted to climb down and didn’t want to climb down.

They were looking across the ravine at me and even throwing their little worthless spears at me. The throws made it about halfway before falling off. I was out of range for them at about 20 feet away.

I was stuck. Do I run off now and try to get home to defend, or do I try to defend here? I had explored around, and this was the only way that I could come down, but I wasn’t sure if these guys could or would climb someplace else. I also was looking for paths for me when I was looking around, not paths that a two-foot-tall monster could make it up and down or at least down. It was at that point that a few of them got pushed off the ledge on the other side, kind of like the way penguins shove each other off the ice.

The ones that fell then started to climb back up towards my side. On their side, more and more of them were getting pushed off, and they began to climb up. As the first ones started to get to the top, I saw that the other side went from having little gremlins to bigger ones. They had clubs and knives. A few even had short bows that looked like longbows for them, and they started to shoot at me.