My hand feels stiff, and my fingers won't move. Not that I would want to move them, given how mangled the whole area is. I’m a little surprised it’s still holding together with all the holes and ripped flesh. Multiple tendons are severed and my skin is bulging in odd areas in my forearm. Probably the muscle bunching up as a result of the lost attachment points…

Uh oh.

I don’t know much medicine, but I know that’s bad. Hard to fix. 'Requires surgery' levels of hard to fix. But I need this hand. It isn’t bleeding profusely anymore... but the bar above stamina, labeled ‘Health’, is only a quarter full. Not much room to work with. Without any other pressing threats, I get to work on fixing my body. The process goes similarly to the ‘practice’ with my mentor, but the complexity of the issue is daunting. I can see the damage when I view my Energy; it appears as glowing areas of red, purple, and some tinges of a yellow green. These colors come with no legend with which to decipher them, so I’m left to use my wits to figure it out. Or ‘wit’, I should say, as implying that I had the presence of mind of a shoe would be an insult to shoes.

The red appears to cover areas where my flesh should be, but isn’t. Like cuts, stabs, and that sort of thing. My hand is covered with a blinding array of red, and it is certainly the most numerous of the lights, so I address it first. Stitch, stitch, and stitch.

With my flesh fully mended, I flex my hand… or try to, anyway. I can just barely close some of my fingers, but straightening them back out is a no go. It’s just as lame as it was before, just not as painful. The bulging muscles are still present… because none of my efforts did anything to fix them. Shit. A quick examination of my hand reveals that the normal lines one can see running along the tops and bottoms of the limb, the tendons that let you open and close your hand, are peacefully laying in whatever configuration is easiest, and certainly not the ones where they're CONNECTED TO MY FINGERS.

Looking at the problem with my Energy senses, I see the purple lights are still present along with the yellow green ones.

I sigh. How do I even begin with this shit.

By taking a break and looking at the notifications I ignored during my life or death flight. I need to recover some Energy anyway.

[Defeated Carnine: +20 Power (270)] [You defeated your first enemy! +50 Power (320)] [Your actions have led to the creation of a basic secondary skill: Hand To Hand Proficiency (Passive). Learn? (y/n) Cost: 50]

Why not. (270)

[Congratulations! Skill levels gained: Transfuse Energy +2 (5)]

------

I sigh, looking down the mountain. There isn’t any more fighting going on, which would be good news if there were predominantly humans down there. Well… living ones anyway. The hills where so many people appeared not too long ago are now filled with slimes, those ‘carnine’ things, and whatever the bigger doglike things are.

I guess I was too out of it to tell the state of things when I started trying to heal, but now, things are fairly quiet. I’m rather far away, but I can see… piles of dead… piles of belongings… the monsters are methodically sorting the results of the ambush. It was an ambush. It would be one thing if this shitty game warned us to be battle ready, or told us ‘hey, maybe get combat training with your mystical mentor while you have the chance’, but no, I was scared off a cliff and given no guidance. I can only assume everyone else was given the same shit.

…

It’s like life from before, just brought to the extreme. Have your hand held your whole life: go to school, go to college, learn something practical(?), sell yourself to companies so they give you the ‘experience’ to convince other companies to hire you for slightly more money.

Here?

I guess we get nothing and are expected to die as failures if we don’t guess right. Fuck, what if somebody chose something like ‘building’ as their core skillset. That’s useful as hell! But unless you’re a fighter, or a coward… you died in that valley.

…

In hindsight, it seems symbolic that the first entity I ran into was an uncaring fuck with a face made of shadow. Is that all this is? A ‘test’, but in reality just torture porn for some fucked up aliens?

It’s hard not to pass judgment then and there. Gather enough power to break free of this place and bring the slaughter to those that sent us here to die. See how they like the sudden appearance of monsters when they thought they were safe.

I sigh. That’s a sobering thought. That’s what anyone who survives this will probably be: a monster.

No. Shaking my head I fumblingly push myself to my feet. There’s more to this. If I reach the end of the road, with all the facts, and there is no redemption for those that brought us here, then…

Then they will suffer.

But before that, I need to survive this. Casting my eyes over the valley of monsters, I know there is no chance of me, as I am, doing anything more than inconveniencing them with another body to carry. That needs to change.

With renewed purpose, I start trudging up the mountain again.

An hour or so passes before I reach a sticking point: a ledge. Normally this would be as simple as doing a pull-up and being along my way, but… I twitch my left hand… I’ll lose my grip and die.

Well, not die die, but I’m positive I’ll fail and it’ll probably hurt. I’ve met my pain quota for the day. Ideally the rest of the week.

I lean against the obstacle and end up in a sitting position facing out, back the way I came. I’ve gotten pretty high up in my hour of hiking. High enough that I’ll be able to see anything coming behind me for a while. I’ll just have to hope nothing drops a rock on my head or something.

Ugh. That's a big part of the problem. You kinda take for granted knowing the general animal population of a planet. You see a spider? Probably venomous, eats bugs, probably spins webs. There’s always caveats and differences, but you get the idea. You see spider webs and it’s almost certainly a spider. But here? There are cohesive balls of slime. What do they eat? Besides… meat. Is anything here not a predator? Hell, I bet the grass can stab you or something.

A place of magic and mystery and it is 100% out to kill me.

But to the matter at hand. A frown crosses my face. How many humans survived? I didn’t see the initial egress, but now I can only see a few small collections of people. Some are alone, some in groups, but generally they look to be sitting around or heading further away from the monster camp. It doesn’t look like anyone else thought climbing a mountain was the best idea… which is good and bad. Strength in numbers is nice and all, but humans are not all reliable… and now that all of our relationships have been functionally reset, none of us have any friends or family to fall back on. No one is going to protect me out of the goodness of their heart here.

Maybe it’s just as well. I’m not sure I want to save anyone either.

Distractions! I really need to fix my hand, but I have no idea how. I could try using the same suture method, specifically targeting the tendons, but i’m not totally sure that would work. I know for a fact that the suture method leaves scars, even if it heals things fast, and I remember something about tendons not dealing with scar tissue very well. I wouldn’t want a quick fix that would just fail when I needed my hand most. No, I need to find a way to completely nullify the damage and make it just like it was before.

If only I wasn’t so damn tired.

Turns out, sitting down when you’ve been running off tons of adrenaline and doing your best to ignore how many people you saw die today works well as long as you’re in motion and not thinking… which is now no longer the case.

Snapshots from my frantic run flash through my mind. Bodies in pieces, eyes full of fear, people missing limbs and still fighting with everything they had… people I ran past…

No, stop, I didn’t kill them, this wasn’t me, it wasn’t my fault

It was I that left them.

I left them because I could do nothing! What could I hope to accomplish? Healing them? Punching? I barely survived my first encounter and I lost my hand!

They died while I watched.

Stop!

Is this who I am? What I am?

I’m not a monster! I’m alive because I ran!

No, you’re I'm not a monster. I ' m a c o w a r d.

“SHUT UP”

My breathing resists any attempts to slow it down, my vision blurs with tears. Crying again. Useless.

Furious with myself, with this world, with the shitty game I’m being forced to play, I violently rub the weakness from my face. I can’t think right now. There’s too much emotional baggage to deal with. My thoughts are just as likely to poison me as they are to help.

What was that thing about ‘inefficient life processes’ or whatever? I search through my menu until I find the section where previous notifications are stored. Yeah, it wanted me to use Power to ‘fix’ my body. I could definitely use some fixing… but it sent that before I was mangled. I… don’t trust this game, but so far, nothing I have willingly initiated with it has hurt me. Learning skills worked fine. It tried to kill me, but it also provided a tutorial of sorts.

[Biological inefficiencies found. Rectify? (Y/N) Cost: 100]

It’s a substantial cost, but I have 270 Power to play with, so… I think it’s worth the risk. Maybe it’ll cure me of all that ails me, or give me super strength.

Whatever, here goes.

I select ‘Y’ (170)... and nothing happens. I look around for a moment, expecting something, anything. Maybe I was already the ideal male specimen? Pfft.

I'm suddenly aware of a small tingling in my feet, which slowly climbs my legs until it reaches my hips. Then the burning starts.

Horrible seizing grips my legs and bolts of pain lance up my spine. I inadvertently kick out and fall over, dimly aware that the tingling is spreading further up my body even as I writhe in agony. There is nothing to describe the feeling of being rewritten, but I feel new empathy for hot metal in a forge. I hear cracking coming from my legs and look just in time to see my ankle snap, hyper extending my toes towards my shin, only to see it snap back into place moments later. I felt both events without any way to reduce the pain, and I can't even scream with my body seizing this much.

Please give me the sweet release of shock, I don’t want to remember any of this, please anything to dull the pain-

With that thought, the fire starts in my torso, and a resulting spasm in my arms causes me to thankfully punch myself in the face and pass into blissful unconsciousness.