It feels good to have a sword back in my hand. Phrasing aside, knowing that I can at least count on my weapon of choice when I'm in a pinch. In the past few games I even started dual-wielding swords once my stats were high enough, but without any sort of system help, I don't think that's wise. I can't say for sure if there are healers around who can re-grow entire missing limbs, but I don't want to experience that sort of healing at all. That is why, for now, I'm going to stick to one sword. That and the fact that I don't have any extra-sensory vision to help with the dual-wielding. Having more eyes helps immensely with kinetic vision, if you didn't know.

So, for the last few hours before I went to sleep, I was practicing. Not some fancy slash-while-doing-flips practicing, just getting a feel for the weight of the sword, letting my muscles soak in the feeling of a sharp swing. The hard part was stopping the blade exactly where I wanted it to stop; even made from bone instead of metal, the thing is heavy. Some of that may be the fact that I haven't really swung a sword in my real body, even if I am in a healthy shape. My brain may have the memory of swinging a sword around like a vaunted warrior of a bygone era, but my body hasn't picked up on that yet.

Conspiracy theorists back on Earth always said that the military had secret capsules that would train the body along with the mind when using simulation technology, but even if it were true, it didn't get sent out on our ship. I'm not even theorizing based on my own pod. When the ship doctor woke up from cryo-sleep after I managed to fracture my wrist during maintenance one day, I complained about being one of the few people who had to use the ship's gym regularly.

He just laughed and said it was a side effect of going in and out of cryo-sleep often enough to keep my metabolism higher than normal. Being frozen over a long period of time, when they do it right, will keep a person from experiencing and sort of physical degradation. Leaving the brain defrosted enough to log into VR was a closed circuit thing, so that didn't count. It came with some heavier side effects of being woken up, stuff that would disable you for a few hours before you were back at working capacity, but it was much better for a long voyage.

Us working types who were on the ship to deal with emergencies didn't have the luxury of a deep-cryo awakening in worst-case scenarios, so myself and a few others, mainly the doc, some mechanics, and the captain, all needed to use the gym regularly or we would lose muscle mass and get fat. Aging was slower in deep-cryo too, but the difference was nowhere near as drastic. Physically, I aged two or three years over our Forty year trip, but the passengers aged around six months or so, even when frozen mostly solid. If they were completely solid and kept out of the VR game, then they wouldn't even age, at least not in any realistic time frame, but that meant there was a very real and significant stress on the brain after they de-frosted. Who would take a chance greater than 1% of not waking up permanently if playing around in VR for a hundred years or so was at least one-hundred times safer. Those numbers are all from shorter term tests, but the numbers didn't vary much in the one, three, five, and ten-year trials they did for cryo-freezing.

Somewhat relatedly, thinking about cryo-stasis while doing sword-exercises in the twilight makes the time just fly by. Now, it's time I find my usual spot in the cathedral and call it a night.

. . .

I forgot to ask someone about general knowledge of the area. . .oh well. Something to do tomorrow before or during the trip.

. . .

Blood. Lots of blood. Red all the way down my arm from the elbow to the sharpened, silver fingertips. Drip, drip, dripping all the way down onto a horned rabbit.

I'm breathing heavily, vision erratic. There were more corpses around, crimson splattered across yellowed-brown fur. One was slit across the throat, one had an eye poked out, and one barely even had a head anymore, bashed in as it was. I couldn't make out much more in the dark. Those were only the few ahead of me in the trampled grass. There were probably others behind me, and the one at my feet had its entrails pulled out, dangling there as the rabbit shuddered.

Oh god.

It's still alive, somehow.

. . .

No. It's. . .dead now. That was just one last shudder of life. the moon in its eye shines flat, no spark of life left there.

. . .

I would throw up at this. It's just horrible. No game world was this. . .realistic before. That or I just knew they weren't real. I can't smell the blood, I can't feel it, but I can see it, and it just. . .there's something visceral about it.

Still, I can't vomit. Not for lack of feeling, but because this isn't my body. I'm back, again, it seems. And instead of puking into the massacre, picking a rabbit up by the leg. The slit-throat one.

I can't see it, we aren't focusing on the rabbit, thankfully, but we are looking around for. . .sticks? Yes, the other, slightly less bloody arm is picking up some sticks, a pile of them, and stacking them near the center of the massacre. We don't walk quickly, maybe hurt somewhere? I can't feel it, but we might have a limp.

The rabbit gets set down, and we start clearing the grass away, digging a pit. Not a big one, not at first. Minutes go by, then in goes the wood. Shouldn't we have dug the pit first then collected the wood? Waste less time bringing it over. . .

Halfway through tossing sticks in the pit, we pause. The last stick we pick up doesn't get tossed into the pile. We hold onto the last stick, then we wave it around a bit. Fire. I had almost forgotten that we stole some sort of instant torch a few nights back. Makes lighting this campfire much easier. Now we're back to holding the rabbit by the legs, letting the blood run out to make for better meat, I guess.

Can we eat all of these corpses by ourself? There's more rabbit meat than we have stomach, let alone whole torso. Maybe some of it is for later, or maybe there were just too many rabbits in one place. I hope we didn't kill them for fun.

Now we slice open the drained rabbit with a claw. It isn't the sharpest edge, but it gets the job done. Cut the meat off the bones and spear it with another stick, one of the ones we left out earlier. Not the magic stick. The meat skewer gets impaled in the ground, hanging over the fire pit. It will cook, slowly. We make more skewers to pass the time.

. . .

Then, we start working on the second rabbit. This one had it's head bashed in. Blood runs out of it faster, the blood left inside it. We turn back to the fire, then freeze in place. A slow turn, looking back over our shoulder. Twin glints in the bushes. Eyes. A predator.

We spin, arms up, claws out. We dropped the rabbit, I see.

Scales and teeth rocket from the grass, firelight bouncing off them like a disco ball.

Spin to the side, slash with claws at its neck. No blood, but a few scales break off.

Caution, waiting, judging the beast that paces further into the clearing, circling us.

We duck the second pumagator. Must have heard it coming. Roll sideways to get away from the first.

The third lands on us, dropping onto our stomach. It's twice our size, probably twice our strength, at least, and it doesn't matter how fast it is.

We're pinned.

We scratch at the creatures neck, scales come away in clouds. Blood sprays down, and it rears back.

We might just-

Darkness. Teeth close out an already darkened sky. Number one or number two must have bit down.

. . .

For a moment nothing happens, then with a flash of black, true black like the kind from the soul-bubble, I'm not there.

My breath is ragged and my heartbeat is pumping like I've just run a marathon. A low murmur of voices is in the background. I open my eyes and see chandeliers. The cathedral.

It was just a dream. I know it was just a dream; even within the dream I knew that. Still, I'm slowly backing away from the heart attack I almost had there.

. . .

I guess, moral of the story: never go camping alone.