[Skill Unlocked! Whether due to constant over exertion or consumption of questionable teas, you spend more time sleeping than you do awake! With each bout of self-induced loss of consciousness, the little voice that screams for you to do better becomes a little more fearful, afraid of the day you take a nap at a bad time! As such, your body has decided to compensate for the mind and you have earned [Maintain Consciousness](Basic).]

[Progress made: ??% toward [Poison Resistance](Sleeping) skill.]

Those two prompts were the first thing to greet me when I awoke. The light that was filtering through the trees overhead was far brighter than it had any right to be and seemed to weigh heavy on my eyes. With muddled thoughts I lethargically read through the notifications several times before comprehending them.

Even after comprehending what the prompts were saying, I couldn’t full register the implications behind them. In my addled state, I was actually excited to have unlocked a new skill. It was even a useful one to boot! Now I’d be able to push myself harder during fights and would worry less about passing out before I could treat mine and Brook’s injuries.

A piercing pain appeared behind my eyes, shooting backwards through my head. Brook! I looked around at the campsite, worried out of my mind. If the sun was up than she should have already woken me up for watch. Instead of a campsite however I was greeted with nothing but trees. I’d been relocated deeper into the forest and covered with branches and leaves.

Right, it was all coming back to me now. The [Poison Resistance] progress had something to do with Brook’s actions the night before. Rather, it had everything to do with them. The beautiful young woman I’d been traveling with for the last few weeks had drugged me and, from the looks of it, made off with some of my belongings. My pack was nearby and still contained a few things, but almost everything made of metal was missing. My canteen, the sword I’d gotten from the lair, even my skinning knife was gone. Sophie! Brook had even stolen my dog!

It was one thing to take everything a man owned, but to even steal my dog was just beyond low. I’d been grifted, robbed blind by a girl that I’d started to fall for. The worst part was, even though I constantly told myself there was no way that she’d been interested in me, a small part of me thought she may have felt the same way about me after all.

Right, well sitting around crying for myself in the middle of the woods wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I pushed myself out of the foliage I’d been buried with and took stock of my situation. Most of the rations I’d stockpiled were missing as well as my weapons. Wait! With a quick pat of my leg I verified the knife I’d gotten from the dungeon went untouched. Thinking back, I never mentioned it to Brook and she’d been too preoccupied with her own loot to notice it at the time.

I didn’t conceal it from her intentionally, but in the end her ignorance worked out in my favor! For all of her teasing and provocation, she’d never actually seen me without my pants on, so the knife managed to survive the robbery. The small voice in the back of my head that had been crying ‘she could have at least fucked me before she fucked me’ finally shut up and I was able to find the silver lining in the situation. Or the steel lining, if my guesses were correct about the material of this knife. Some would even value this small blade, about the length of my hand, higher than the bronze sword I’d lost because of its far higher durability.

Apart from that, the sinew I’d been harvesting was still located in the pack alongside the fire starting kit and a few neat looking rocks I picked up along my travels. Okay, so she’d mostly robbed me blind but at least she left me materials to keep myself warm and not literally blind when the night fell. She also didn’t kill me which was a plus, I guess.

I got to thinking about why Brook had betrayed me, but quelled that train of thought pretty quickly. It didn’t really matter if she’d left because of the way I looked at her, or maybe the way I didn’t look at her. In the end she’d left, and that was just something I had to accept.

I had a few scrapes and cuts on my back, which I chalked up to being dragged through the forest while I slept, and a pretty bad headache, but I was otherwise unharmed from the entire endeavor. That would change if I ran into another beast or a bandit however, so my first concern right now was equipping myself.

Whereas the knife was undoubtedly of a high quality, it was far too close quarters for me. After walking around looking for a tree with branches low enough and sturdy enough to suit my purpose, I finally found what I was looking for. I sawed off a six foot length of wood from a nearby hickory tree. Before settling down to whittle away at it I used up my mana coaxing some edible plants from my surroundings. Most forgeable food had become scarce as the winter set in, picked clean by animals storing up fat for the winter or squirreling it away.

To my surprise, using up the mana actually lessened my headache by a good portion and even slowly improved my condition as it regenerated. I found a nearby trunk of a fallen tree and sat down to begin my work. The branch I’d selected was about 2 inches in diameter and six feet long. I did my best to trim off all the little branches that, well, branched off the branch and stripped it of leaves. I then sawed off the knobs that protruded too far and rubbed it against a nearby rock to attempt to smooth it out a bit.

I now had a long pole, but that was about it. I decided it was serviceable and started carving away at the end of it to make a good point. This part took a lot longer than I had expected it to and was very taxing, physically and mentally. I managed to fashion a pointed end that was about 4 inches long, and was back to collecting branches. This time it was for a small fire, which I used to temper the end of the spear. By baking it I was able to remove the moisture from the recently living hickory branch, making it a better weapon than a bendy green branch.

It took more than a few hours but I managed to carve a pretty rudimentary spear from the hickory branch. The wood was flexible enough that it might just survive an encounter or two, but still not really sharp enough to be a threat to anyone. Unfortunately, my lackluster rock collection wasn’t of useful rocks of the pointed variety, but of shiny or smooth ones I thought looked nice. I won’t say I was collecting them to have them made into a relatively cheap but sentimental piece of jewelry for Brook because that would just be sad, but I also don’t know why I was collecting them.

In the future I decided I would keep my eye open for useful rocks, the kind that could be spearheads or arrow heads. That being said, I didn’t pour out the pebbles. Even if they didn’t carry the memory I thought they would, it was still a memory worth keeping. A lesson learned. A new challenge to overcome.