A sudden jolt and blinding light. Your balance adjusts instantaneously but It takes your eyes a split second to adjust to the brightness. You see trees and vegetation around you and the sounds of rustling leaves and the drone of insects put you on edge.

You stand up. It seems that you are in a forest of sorts. The sudden jolt from changing inertia indicates some sort of transposition or teleportation — and you can’t seem to recall anything that happened before you woke up in a world that spins slower than your previous one.

You take a moment to get a grasp of the situation — slowing down your heartbeat and focusing on the immediate surrounding. The first thing you need to do is find shelter and a weapon or two. You clearly remember weapons and you have vague glimpses of using them. You find a fallen branch as thick as your arm and almost twice as long. “This will do for now”.

You search for trails or signs of other people or creatures. There are a few signs of activity, mostly animal tracks. Not remembering a thing bothers you — but it isn’t one of your most immediate concerns. Being isolated in an unknown environment is clearly more pressing than losing one’s memory — if you ever had them in the first place. Once you’re safe, you can ponder the implications of your amnesia and what to do about it. For now, survival is your only focus.

The sun starts dipping on the horizon. Thoughts of nocturnal predators begin to enter your mind. You don’t want to be vulnerable on the ground — especially if you want to sleep.

A nearby tree seems suitable for climbing — it stands fairly high and its branches are more than a few meters from the ground. Hopefully, this forest’s predators won’t be the climbing type. You easily find handholds and footholds — even while holding the makeshift club in one hand. Your inherent strength and agility make the climb easy and very soon you are safely far from the ground.

From above you get an idea of the extent of the forest. You can see trees for miles and you are smack in the middle of it.

You settle yourself on a thick branch — strong enough to support your weight but still a bit narrow. You are quite confident that you can stay motionless while sleeping so it isn’t much of a problem.

You close your eyes and sleep.

As night deepens, you are awakened by high-pitched screeches and the flapping of tiny wings. You open your eyes and see bat-like creatures flying around you.

“Bats?”

The flying creatures are certainly similar to bats — with a few glaring differences. They seem larger and their skin and fur are a crimson red. Bony claw-like protrusions extend from the joints in their wings and your keen eyesight perceives the sharpness of those hooks,

You ponder on your memories of these creatures, or rather the bats that they are similar to. They don’t seem to come from actual encounters with the flying rodents — rather an instinctive knowledge passed on genetically or through psychic connections.

One of the larger bats comes flying towards you. Club in hand, you wait until it gets close and swat it with your weapon — adjusting the strength of your strike to avoid misting the bat and destroying your simple club. The bat crumples on contact, and the hit sends it crashing to the forest floor.

A furor of activity follows as the surrounding bats start screeching and flapping their wings with a bit more intensity — noting the presence of a predator or threat. However, instead of fleeing — the strange bats start circling your location.

The swarm rushes towards you — a tide of crimson fur and hooked claws. The first bats get struck down by your club, but the ensuing mass proves more difficult to manage. You avoid the bats as much as you can in the limited space — striking the ones that couldn’t easily be avoided. The situation, though far from dangerous, is becoming tedious.

Every one of your strikes hit a flying bat — sometimes even hitting several. Even with your continuous striking, you feel no trace of fatigue setting in — not even weariness in your muscles. However, the thought of defending yourself from a wave of bats until morning is not something you relish. Better to find a way to end this quickly.

“The screeches….” a thought comes to mind.

Bats navigate through echolocation and these strange bats should be doing the same. You focus your senses — listening to the underlying frequencies and soon you begin to hear their ultrasonic cries.

Within a few seconds, you figure out the ones they use to navigate. You take a measure of the sounds. They are ultrasonic and something you can’t replicate with your voice — but there are other methods.

You rub your thumb and middle finger to produce the ultrasonic sound — all the while continuing your barrage of strikes and skillful evasion. It takes a few moments to fine-tune, but soon you find the right frequency the bats are using.

Bats close to you start losing their bearings. Some of them start hitting trees and some collide with their fellow bats. A few bats still manage to charge towards your general direction — and promptly get hit with your club and get sent straight to the forest floor.

It doesn’t take long before the bats start to disperse — escaping the zone of silent sound around you. Broken bat bodies litter the ground beneath the tree and a few small predators come out of the shadows to feed on the downed and injured creatures. You survey the scene for a few minutes and note no particular threat. Once again you close your eyes — this time confident that there are no immediate threats.

You wake hours before dawn. Darkness covers the forest, but a few patches of starlight is enough to give you a clear view of your surroundings. No soreness or stiffness from sleeping on a branch or the encounter with the bats — but somehow it seems natural.

As you wait for the sun, you address the gnawing feeling you’ve had ever since you woke up. This place is brimming with energy — as if the air was charged with some sort of ozone after a lightning strike. You sense a hint of corruption underneath all the energy — perhaps this was what made the bats look and act unnatural.

You unconsciously rub your fingers remembering the events of the night. The ultrasonic sound once again fills your surrounding — but this time you focus on the echoes. Soon you begin to catch broken images in your mind’s eye — and before the first rays of light appear on the horizon, you already grasped how the bats used echolocation.

You tumble down from the tree — landing on your feet. There are a few bats still lying on the forest floor but most have been taken by nocturnal predators. While you don’t feel hunger pangs as of yet, you feel it would be prudent to replenish and store a bit of energy with some food.

You look at the fallen bats — carbon-based life forms quite suitable for eating. With an instinctive knowledge of your own biology, you know that eating them raw would have little to minimal repercussions. However, you decide to at least cook them first. There’s not much meat on these small bat bodies, but they’ll do for now.

You gather wood and some kindling. In the back of your mind, there seem to be easier ways to start a fire but you can’t seem to grasp it at the moment. A split piece of wood on the ground serves as the base to hold the kindling and a thin straight branch will be the fire starter.

Holding the branch between your thumb and two fingers, you start turning it back and forth — drilling into the wood and the friction from the spinning branch and the wood starts producing heat. First smoke then a small spark of fire. The kindling slowly catches fire and you start feeding the fire with the wood you gathered.

Once the fire is stable, you begin roasting a few bats. They aren’t that bad — but nothing great either.

A pang of thirst hits you after eating. Not an actual need for water but more of an instinctual thing. You know you can go on for a few more days without water before it actually hampers your condition — but you still decide on finding a water source just to be sure.

You take note of the trees around you, particularly the fruit-bearing ones, and you gather a few fruits to see if they’re edible. Your sense of smell is particularly sharp — capable of noticing toxins that would impede your bodily functions even before tasting them. Some of these fruits do have toxins — but none that would have any particular effect on you.

Relying on fruits for water might not seem to be ideal so you focus your hearing to catch the sound of water. The forest is rich in ambient sounds but you filter everything out until you hear the familiar sound of a raging river.

Before heading out to the river, you do a bit of preparation. You take your makeshift club and sharpen its point on an outcrop of rock. Not the most ideal of weapons — but it’s better than nothing. It would have to make do for now.

You gather a few rocks to use as projectiles. You test your accuracy on some squirrels with a casual throw.

“Tsk,” confirm would be a better word.

You knew the stone was going to hit the moment you held it. Throwing the stone was just an act of confirmation and a test of the poor creature’s vitality.

It died — head crushed by a flying rock thrown at a speed it couldn’t react to. The stone landed precisely as you expected. It hit the squirrel right on the head, obliterating its brain but keeping the body mostly intact. It seems like bigger prey won’t be an issue with just a few stones.

Halfway to the river you smell the scent of blood and hear the rustlings of a large creature. Half a mile away, you finally get a glimpse of the creature — a large bear. While not exactly the bear you have in your memory, it certainly comes close. Bony growth protrudes from its 8-foot frame and you reckon it probably weighs half a ton or more.

Thinking about weight yours would be 112 kilos. Not probably — exactly. Your smaller frame might not reflect it, but your body is dense with muscles and your bones seem to be quite heavy.

You drop your sharpened club. That thing won’t do a thing to that bony bear hide. You grab a stone the size of a fist and throw it straight to one of the bear’s eyes.

It hits the bear right in the eye but a layer of filament seems to stop it from penetrating the eye. “Evolution?” You ponder as the bear starts charging towards you.

The bear is massive and quite fast — but not fast enough. Judging by its charge, you’ll have no problem evading its strikes. The problem is damaging it. Without suitable weapons, the situation is a bit more complicated.

“Brain, eyes, heart, joints”. You eliminate its eyes and heart from your targets. You’ll need something harder than a wooden stake to get through the bear’s hide and those bony protrusions. “The brain then,” you decide. A strong enough blow will have this bear reeling with a concussion.

It strikes. You avoid the blow with ease by taking a quick step back only to see jagged projections of force emanating from the bear’s claws. You feel a sharp blow to your chest — piercing your skin but not enough to reach bone. The strike sends you flying 30 feet across the forest, only stopping when you hit a tree.

Flashes of pain warn you of minor damage — nothing alarming or debilitating. You stare at the bear with new eyes and a word comes to mind.

“Caster”.