My left hand covered my eyes, my right hand grabbed the snake, and the snake bit me on my skull simultaneously. I was in pain from the bite, happy that it was to my head, so the fangs couldn’t go in very far.

I moved my right arm away from my body as the snake wrapped its body around my wrist. I’d managed to grab close enough to the neck that all it could do was hiss now. I couldn’t stand up where I was because of being in the bush, but I could roll to the side and try to bash the snake into the ground.

As I started the process of hitting the snake into the ground, I quickly realized that it was an ineffective process. The body of the snake held up quite well to a rough beating.

My head, at this point, was throbbing, and blood was dripping down my face and into my eyes. The snake, for its part, kept trying to bite and was also squeezing for all it was worth.

In the top right of my vision, a red bar had shown up, and it was missing about a tenth. Next to that bar was a small neon green drip and a number 10 in the middle of it.

I didn’t fully understand what I was looking at but felt like it had to be part of the HUD that was implanted into me, and it was telling me that I’d been poisoned. Which I kind of knew since I was bit by a venomous snake.

I rolled to my left and fished my hand axe out from under my pack. I then rocked back to my right to try to pin the snake to the ground. I felt at this point that my wrist was about to break. It wasn’t a good feeling, nor was the sight of the red bar moving down more.

I started to try to hit the snake’s head with my axe, but it still had enough range of motion that it was dodging my attacks. I also was using my off hand while lying down.

When I saw that braining wasn’t going to work, I dropped my axe and grabbed closer to the head with my left hand, and started to slide it up the body to the neck. It wasn’t able to bite me because of my hand placement, and then I began to squeeze just behind the neck. While snakes have strong muscles, I was hoping that I could pop the head off.

My red bar was down to the halfway mark when a green bar showed up and started to move down slowly as well. It was when the green was down halfway and the red at a quarter that the snake’s head popped off the body. The neon green dripping number by my health bar was down to 2. When the number disappeared entirely, I got another pop-up.

END OF COMBAT

You have survived to the end of combat with a foe able to cause you harm

6 damage taken poisoned!

First kill bonus plus 1 to strength and 1 weapon skill of choice

Though your actions in combat

NEW KNOWLEDGE HAS BEEN GRANTED TO YOU!

Snake handling (Level 0)

I dropped the snake from my arm and pushed my hands to my head. I had a lump on the right side of my skull through my hair where I was bitten. It was sore, and so was my arm, where it was wrapped around. The snake body was still on and off, trying to squeeze, and so I pried it off and pushed it and the head away from me. It was the second time in recent history I passed out.

When I woke up, the sun was out, and I felt better but still weak. In the top right of my vision was still the red bar, and it was showing mostly empty. I’d say that only about a tenth of the bar was full. The green bar was completely missing from my vision now. I’d no idea what it meant but seeing how the red one showed up when I got bit, I figured it had to be a visual of my heath. Since I was envenomed, it would make sense that I wasn’t fully healthy.

I managed to crawl my way out of my bush, pulling my gear and even the snake body with me. I thought about pulling the head with me, but I didn’t know how the venom would react to other things and if I could even put it on my spear. When I got out, the first thing I did was lean up against a tree and tried to catch my breath. The green bar which had been gone was back again and showing at half a bar. It seemed to go down as I pushed myself to do things.

I looked around from the tree and noticed that there were lots of footprints around, not of people but rather animals. They were all near the water, and I even saw blood nearby where it looked like there had to have been a fight since there were tufts of fur. This seemed like quite the happening place, and so it made me feel like I shouldn’t stay here for another night. I needed to find someplace that I was safe in my sleep so that I wouldn’t get attacked then. I also needed to heal up, and so I was overall worried about everything.

My headache was very real and very much worse than the one I’d yesterday when I started. I made my way to the water and spent time washing my wound. It oddly didn’t feel as bad as I thought it would, but there was still lots of dried blood.

Once I did that, I looked around to see if I could find anything to eat. I could make a fire and try to cook the snake, which was why I brought it out with me. I’d never cooked a snake before, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to do.

I ended up finding a few wild onions that I pulled up and washed. Then I made a fire. While I knew that it would attract some attention with the smoke, it would be less than it would have been at night from the light. So I went back into my bush shelter to make the fire. While it would have to be a small one because of the bush, I was hoping the leaves on the evergreen bush would help to defuse the smoke some so that it wouldn’t be as apparent to the people I got away from that I was here.

I skinned the snake, which was relatively easy since its head was missing. The skin just pulled away like a sausage wrapper. I used my hand axe to chop/smash it into smaller sections before I grabbed a stick and started to cook it like they were marshmallows. As I ate, I noticed that the red bar started to move up some. It didn’t appear to be dependent on how much I ate; instead, it was a steady pace that started once I no longer felt hungry.

It took another hour before I felt like I could move around without being tired. Whatever was done to my body in the past several months has made it so that it would bounce back much faster than it used to. There is no doubt in my mind that, the me a year ago, being bitten by a snake in the head would have ended me and not just made me slow for a few hours.

Now that I could move, it was time to get a move on. I didn’t want to stay in this type of spot again. Bushes were fun to turn into forts when I was a kid, but not so much now that I was trying to stay safe at night. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were other animals that last night couldn’t figure out how to get in that got in tonight. I needed a better spot, so I needed to move. I also needed to keep putting distance between me and wherever I came from.

It would be dumb, and I wasn’t that dumb to leave the nearness of the brook and make it hard to get water. So I figured my best bet was to follow the brook downstream and see if it met up with a larger stream or river. Then depending on the size, I might be able to find a better place to hole up and rest.

I spent about three hours hiking down the right side of the brook until it joined with a creek or stream, or perhaps it was a small river. I never knew what would make something a river versus a stream. It was about two or three feet deep and around fifteen or twenty feet across and cold, very cold. It reminded me of the Green River in Saluda, North Carolina, near the waterfalls, so I guess it was a river since it was about the same size. I wanted to find someplace that had more rocks, and I could make a safe camp and figure out why things were leveling up and why I was wearing furs. I had my guess that I’d escaped from someplace or perhaps was still a test subject; however, I wasn’t 100% convinced that everything was as it first seemed to me.

Some things just seemed off. Other than wearing a fur and being told I’d levels. Not being able to read a book but clearly being able to read was a huge one. Then there were the other things that were messing with me. I’d seen a squirrel that had a horn. Now I might have written it off as me not seeing things right; however, I saw it ram another one that fell off a branch. When I checked on the squirrel that fell, I saw it was dead and had a small hole about the size of a number 2 pencil eraser in its chest. I also saw a sparrow-sized bird have a single leg with a talon on it like I’d expect on a hawk. These were but a few things that made me less inclined to think my first assessment was completely right.

I wanted to head downstream because that is how you find people. Humans liked big rivers, and the bigger, the better. I was almost sure that if I went far enough downstream, I would find a town, and then I could get help. I crossed over the brooke that I had been following and headed down the bank of the river.

I didn’t get fifty feet when I heard what sounded like a weed trimmer spinning up. I looked around for the sound and saw flying right at me a yellow jacket the size of a baseball bat.