Wha—?” I mumble blearily, my eyes crossing. I can see white and black in front of me, but the shapes aren’t resolving themselves into anything recognizable. What happened? Light, pain …

  A screen. A status screen. That’s right. There’s the sound of something thudding next to me, and a strong musky smell meets my nose, which wrinkles in response.

  I can’t see. I need to see. What was the thing I needed to say again? Oh yes. “Close screen.” The blurry figures disappear, and I find myself staring at a rock. A rock that is covered in blood. My blood. I got hit by a rock? Is it raining rocks now?

  I can only blame the almost certain concussion for the glacial progress of my thoughts. Honestly, I’m surprised my skull didn’t explode like a watermelon—it must have only been a glancing blow. If it’s raining rocks, I need to get to shelter yesterday.

  Abruptly, I hear a rustle of feathers. Turning towards it, I’m just in time to see a sharp beak coming at my face. I flinch back, my head protesting fervently at the movement. It’s enough to avoid getting my eyes pecked out. Instead, the sharp beak latches onto my nose.

  “Gerrof!” I shout, squinting through tears of pain. I flail my arms in front of me and, more by luck than design, manage to hit it in the neck.

  “Wark! ” I hear, and the bird lets go. The relief is temporary—now it’s released my nose, it has full access to the rest of my body.

  I curl up, trying to avoid the painful bites as much as possible. Meanwhile, my stomach is trying to exit my body and my head is aching fit to burst. My nose would also like to register its discontent, but I have no time for that. This is not working. The bloody bird is going to win at this rate. The rock it must have dropped on my head has done half of the job for it already. The rock!

  Bit by bit, I shift back towards the rock and cover it with my body. I grip it with my hand, preparing even as the bird starts drawing blood through my clothes. Summoning up all my strength, I explode into movement.

  Well, I stagger to a half-kneeling position, at least, and scrabble with one hand to grab the bird anywhere I can—its neck, it turns out—and flail with the rock. Once more, luck seems to be with me. I’ve actually grabbed it at a good point to drag its head down to the ground, where I can start beating at it with the rock.

  I start swearing with each blow, taking out all my anger and fear at the situation I’ve found myself in on the now-helpless bird. Eventually, it stills and its body collapses. Its wings go limp from where they had been battering at my body, and it becomes a dead weight against me. I stop myself when the head is just bloody mush and lean back to sit on my heels, staring blankly ahead of me.

  Emotions course through me, unfamiliar both in their type and intensity. Recently, all I’ve experienced this strongly are fear and grief. And, of course, the leaden dragging of hopelessness and depression that has almost consumed me more than once in the last week. This … There’s fear, to be sure: the lingering twisting, curdling sense of terror. But how ironic for someone who stood on the edge of a building so recently, only a bare few centimeters away from tumbling to my death, that the fear is of dying.

  The perfect opportunity to solve all my problems by just letting the bird do its thing appears and I suddenly discover that I don’t want to die.

  I laugh suddenly, feeling like a weight has been lifted from my chest. It’s illogical, and ridiculous, but so many of my thoughts over the past while have been consumed with questioning whether I even wanted to continue living. To suddenly be confronted with an unmistakable desire for survival is … a relief. A decision, finally.

  Having acknowledged that, I now realize what the other emotion running riot through me is. Triumph. This bird attacked me, tried to kill me, and it failed because I succeeded in killing it first. It’s been so long since I have felt the triumph of winning that I almost don’t recognize the sensation. Of course, then I realize I’ve “won” by killing another living creature, and I feel a moment of guilt and not a little nervousness at this new side of myself. I’ll admit it—I’m a soft office worker. I don’t even kill spiders I find in my bathtub! Never in a million years would I have imagined I would brutally beat in the head of some bird.

  I console myself that I didn’t go seeking this fight; the bird is the one who dropped a rock on my head. That, of course, reminds me of the pain in my head, my nose, and innumerable other places in my body, which are no doubt becoming dark bruises as I sit here and think. Plus, if another of those creatures attacks me with my head the way it is—both my state of mind and my actual physical state—I’ll be done for. Actually … wasn’t there something about healing in the list Nicholas wrote?

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  I check the table and see that either the bird’s flailing around or mine has knocked everything off its surface. I curse and my stomach drops. Now that I’ve rediscovered a zest for life, I feel like I’m scrabbling for every possible advantage I can get. I need to find those stones!

  Setting the table back on its legs from where it had been knocked onto its side, I search around the area for Nicholas’s gifts. The letter is an obvious pale spot, and I grab it. It’s slightly smudged by blood but still legible, thankfully. I use the list of items to find everything and put them back on the table. Then, with a wary glance up at the sky, I grab the items instead and tuck myself under the table—just in case another avian decides to try to drop a stone on my head.

  Feeling a little bit more secure under cover, my stomach only settles once I’m sure I haven’t lost anything. With how disadvantaged I am already, I really can’t afford to lose even one of these lifelines.

  The last few minutes have proven just how quickly things can turn into a fight for life or death. I take in a deep breath and try to pull myself together a bit. I may still have a stomach that feels like a pile of quivering jelly and probably a concussed head, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think. Still, sorting out my physical discomfort would probably help.

  I knock back one of the health potions. In just a few seconds, my head is significantly clearer—and painless. My eyes widen as the implications sink in, then my stomach sinks again as I realize that I might have made a mistake. If it cleared my cracked skull and other bumps and bruises so easily, how would it do with more significant life-threatening problems? I have no idea what is facing me; what if tomorrow I end up with a broken bone or something, and no potion?

  Come on, Markus, I tell myself sternly. Pull yourself together. Think logically. You can’t change the past, but you can change the future. All right, try to think through this logically, like it’s just another problem at the office. Though, maybe that’s a bad idea as I was recently fired, probably to be replaced by some ticketing system based in India … No, don’t think about that, I reprimand myself. I have no desire to once more sink into dark depression. I’m stuck far from home in a completely unfamiliar environment. That’s the problem.

  However, I do have resources available to me. I have a lot of things in my bags—though, whether they’ll prove useful for survival in the wilderness remains to be seen—and I have the items Nicholas gave me. Surely I can find a solution to my issue about survival among all of those? I review the item list in the letter again. Which items are essential for my survival now and which will be more important later? I’ve already absorbed the Class stone, and Nicholas suggested absorbing the Lay-on-Hands Skill stone after the Class stone. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be for, but I’ve already decided that I need to trust his advice. Maybe it’s some sort of crafting Skill, enabling me to magically make the things I need for survival by touching the right materials? That would be pretty useful. Absorbing the stone seems like the natural next step.

  After that, there are four more stones: two knowledge stones, a lore stone, and a skill stone. I don’t know if there’s any difference between the capital S for the Lay-on-Hands Skill stone and the small s for the tracking skill stone, or if that’s just a writing error. From what I understand of the implications in Nicholas’s letter, I can absorb a “Skill” stone and knowledge stone without a problem, but can I do the same with a “skill” stone and knowledge stone? Do I want to take the risk? Probably not, as the consequences would be that I lose a large part of the information from the stone, making it worthless. All of these seem far too important to my survival to do that. In fact, that’s the problem: I can’t really decide which one stone is the most important now. They’re all important!

  Though Nicholas didn’t put a description of the stones into the letter, I have to guess that the tracking skill stone and hunting knowledge stone are what they say on the tin. The problem is that both of those are going to be absolutely essential for me once the rations Nicholas has given me run out—hunting to provide the meat and tracking to find the animals in the first place. As for the other two, the System lore stone will probably tell me more about the Class system, which will be important as I progress.

  Of all of them, this is the only one I can put in the “important later” category, as it doesn’t seem quite so essential to my immediate survival. The final one, on the other hand, is a good candidate for the first stone I use after the Skill stone, if it does what I think it might. Woodcraft could mean carpentry—literally crafting with wood—but I have to guess from what Nicholas said that it’s more likely to mean the other sense of the word: being able to survive in the wood. While that might not help me much with the mountain I’m currently on, it will no doubt be invaluable in the forest that fills the vast majority of the valley I’m more likely to spend time in.

  Of course, before I can decide on the order, I need to check out my Intelligence level. Nicholas was clear: unless I have an Intelligence stat over ten, I can’t absorb more than one knowledge stone a day. That said, I would imagine my Intelligence is over ten unless I start at zero because I’ve just gained my Class. After all, I always did pretty well at school, and I left uni with a First Class degree. Plus, I’ve worked most of the time since leaving uni, and my employers have generally been satisfied with my performance. Until the last one—cost-cutting misers. “Status screen,” I say, then reflexively flinch sideways. The last time I did this, a rock landed on my head. I don’t think the two are linked, but better safe than sorry.

  When nothing comes flying at me or lands on the table above my head, I focus on the screen itself.