Paul woke to the clamor of approaching footsteps.

He lunged upwards, only to collapse back to the ground with a sharp hiss of breath through clenched teeth as his shattered ribs and torn stomach muscles registered stabbing complaints to his sudden movement. He lay on the ground gasping like a stranded fish. His wheezing breaths were shallow and desperate, his broken ribs preventing him from filling his lungs. For a few moments, all he could think of was the litany of injuries that covered his body.

Scorched skin. Shattered bone. Wounds caked with blood. Paul squinted his eyes shut, willing himself unconscious again.

Being asleep was so much better than this.

It might have worked, but for the approaching footsteps. Paul reluctantly opened his eyes again. He knew he had to move, had to leave before the footsteps found him. He searched with shaking hands around his body, finding first the comforting cold bone of his rat-claw knife with one hand and then the troll’s feather with the other. He clutched both close, tucking the feather down his burned buck-skins to rest against his chest and sliding the knife in its raw leather sheath.

He rolled over with a grunt and leveraged himself to his unsteady feet. Paul turned to the source of the footsteps. A bolt of panic stole the air from his lungs. The steps came from the far end of the cavern, the same entrance the trolls used last time. The opening led to a long tunnel, illuminated by a myriad of sputtering, bobbing torches. The flickering light revealed the faces of the trolls that held them.

Paul didn’t have the time or the need to count the number that approached him. He what the answer would be: “Too many.”

One would be too many right now, but they brought a fucking army.

The lead trolls shouted and pointed as they saw Paul, and they began to lope toward him, their long, skeletal legs carrying them meters with each stride.

Paul almost fell with his first shuffling step, his left buckling under him. He winced and tried again, limping his way to the cavern exit, back toward the familiar caverns he had tucked away in his mind, his Pathfinding skill allowing him to catalog every nook and every false dead end that he may be able to use to hide.

The sound of the mob of trolls drew closer behind him, and he urged his legs to move faster. Bile churned in his gut, his body rebelling against another surge of adrenaline so soon after its last release. He reached the exit, and drug his hand against the jagged stone of the constricting tunnel for support. Sharp rock sliced against his hand, leaving his palm slick, and leaving a smeared trail of blood along the cavern wall. He bent double and wrenched a Javelin from the neck one of the trolls he had previously killed. It made a poor walking stick, but Paul didn’t feel especially picky at the moment.

His pack was where he had left it, wedged along the tunnel wall. Seymore peeked his head out of the rucksack as Paul approached. If Paul didn’t know better, he would have thought that the little lizard’s expression was concerned. He hefted the pack without stopping, then stumbled and screamed as the pack’s straps dug through his rawhides into the burned skin of his right shoulder. He could feel as a patch of skin slid away from his flesh under the pressure.

Paul blinked away tears and bit his cheek, filling his mouth with blood. He held the javelin in the crook of his arm and fumbled with the pack’s hip straps, then the chest straps. His shaking, bloody fingers slipped on the carved bone toggles twice before he was able to secure the load, it’s weight now held on his hips instead of his shoulders.

He never considered leaving the pack, despite its weight. Inside it and strapped to it were his weapons, his tools, food, and water. Everything that Paul had created in the past few months to survive. He knew he could produce them again, but the pack and its contents held weeks worth of effort, and he wasn’t leaving it behind if he had a choice.

The sound of running trolls grew louder. Paul ducked as a hurled boulder flew by his side, missing him by inches. He knew he would not be that lucky for long. He needed to run. He didn’t know if he could run.

After months in this crucible of pain, however, Paul knew that he could try.

Another rock sailed above his head, breaking into shards when it hit the cavern wall and pelting his face with shrapnel.

Paul lengthened his strides, and his left knee shot daggers of agony up his leg. He let the pain come.

He quickened his steps, and the straps of his pack rubbed against and tore his burned skin. Rivulets of hot blood ran down his chest and back, soaking through his buckskin vest. Paul let the pain wash over him.

He breathed in deep, clutching at his side as his broken ribs protested. The wave of pain threatened to overwhelm him, but as he had done before, he didn’t fight it. Instead, he dove into it.

It nearly brought him to his knees. It almost dashed him against the rocks. It nearly broke him. But Paul ran.

Soon the light from the cavern’s fungus faded, and darkness closed in. Paul’s Nightvision wasn’t enough for him to run by, and he scraped the bottom of his well of intent, enough to light a single, tiny globe of light that lit his way.

He didn’t know how long he ran. Long enough for his lungs to burn. Long enough for cramps to grasp at his sides and for his calves to ache. At some point, Seymore had crawled from the pack to drape around the back of his neck, but Paul didn’t have the energy to return him to the rucksack.

He didn’t know when he dropped the javelin he carried, or how many times he fell, cutting gashes in his knees. Instead of pumping powerfully with each stride, his arms hung loosely from his sides.

He led the trolls in a twisting, convoluted path through the tunnels. Pathfinding saved him from choosing any dead ends, and several times he led the trolls through the same tunnel junctions, tracing long serpentine loops along the cave system.

The trolls caught on, however, leaving sentries of two or three trolls in the junctions after they had been led through them more than once, limiting Paul’s options and shrinking the usable size of the cave system Paul had mapped in his head. So far he had avoided leading the trolls to any of his camps, and he wanted to keep it that way.

His pursuers also split their number several times, trying to surround Paul in the network of passages. They nearly succeeded twice, each time Paul rounding a corner to see a flicker of torchlight play against the tunnel wall, forcing him to double back the first time and barely scramble past the shouting ambush party the second time, earning him a deep gash in his side from an ax blade.

He felt a sliver of hope when his pursuers torches began to sputter and go out. His hope was short-lived, however, when he saw that they had brought spare torches, kindling the fresh lights from their dying embers of the old.

He wasn’t sure when he stopped hearing the trolls behind him, only that when his legs gave out beneath him, lurching him against the damp stone of a cave wall, all he could hear was his own labored breathing. He pawed for a waterskin, dizzy with thirst. He took greedy mouthfuls of the tepid water, only to vomit it back up almost immediately.

He took smaller sips, rinsing the stomach acid from his mouth, and this time it stayed down. He was beyond exhausted. He blinked, only to snap his eyes open as his chin fell to his chest.

Paul knew he couldn’t stay in this section of the cavern. It was exposed, and if the trolls decided to explore this section of caves, they would find Paul sleeping at their feet.

Getting back up was one of the hardest things Paul had ever done. His muscles had stiffened in just his few moments of rest, and he had to pull himself up the cave wall to get to his feet. His legs wobbled under his weight.

Step by step though, Paul made his way to a part of the caves he had avoided until now - a small, intricate maze of narrow tunnels, precipitous drops and ledges and frequent cave-ins. This part of the complex also only had one entrance, which is why he had avoided it while being chased, not wanting to be trapped in a dead end.

Paul squeezed through a cramped bottle-neck where the tunnel had partially collapsed, forcing him to scramble on his hands and knees over shifting rocks to fit through a narrow opening near the cavern roof. He half-slid half-fell down the loose stones on the other side. He wanted nothing more than to fall asleep right there, body sprawled on the sharp rocks.

He forced himself to crawl a few meters from the cave-in to a relatively flat piece of ground, where he unlimbered his pack. He pulled out a piece of dried meat and tore off a small portion for Seymore. He chewed slowly and tried to avoid his swollen cheek. He caught himself nodding off while eating, and slapped himself to keep himself awake.

I’m going to feel even worse when I wake up if I go to sleep like this.

Grimacing, he began to peel away the ruins of his buckskins from his battered body. He whimpered as pieces of burnt skin came away with his vest. Using his ball of light, Paul inspected and cleaned his wounds as best he could with water from his skins. He gasped as the water hit his raw flesh.

Paul knew his body was healing much faster than what was natural, and none of his wounds since his ordeal began had developed an infection, but with the amount of trauma he had suffered, he felt it was best to give his body the best chance he could to heal itself.

He made his way to a nearby drop-off, where he relieved himself. Only then did Paul lay out the rolled rat skins from his pack that he used as a bedroll and blanket when he couldn’t find a convenient shelf-fungus and lay down to rest.

His eyes drooped closed. He wondered if now that he was ready to sleep if it would escape him like it sometimes had when he trained with the System Guard, when his body was bone-tired, but his mind was too wired to let him sleep.

Paul began snoring softly before he finished the thought.